Oral Answers to Questions

WALES

The Secretary of State was asked—

Research Funding

Ian Lucas: What recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills on funding for research for universities in Wales; and if he will make a statement.

Huw Irranca-Davies: I have regular discussions with ministerial colleagues at the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills to discuss a variety of issues affecting Wales, and Welsh universities have a vital role to play in meeting the challenges of the future, not only in increasing the knowledge economy of Wales, but in encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation.

Ian Lucas: North East Wales institute in my constituency, which we all hope will shortly be a university, has a proud record of research, particularly in attracting private investment into research. Since 2001, it has raised £2.7 million for its polymer investment programme, 80 per cent. of which has come from the private sector—

Mr. Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman must not make a speech. He can put a question—how's that?

Ian Lucas: indicated dissent.

Mr. Speaker: That is even better still. The Minister can answer now.

Huw Irranca-Davies: I got the gist of it, Mr. Speaker; I am happy to reply. The North East Wales institute has been right at the forefront of research. It has received £120,000 from the research investment fund since 2004-05. In particular, its innovation centre has made remarkable progress through links with Rolls-Royce, Airbus UK, Siemens, Jaguar and DaimlerChrysler. My hon. Friend will continue to receive support from myself and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State; there is no more powerful advocate for the North East Wales institute than my hon. Friend.

Mark Williams: Despite the Minister's professed support for research funding, is he aware of the potential cuts to the physics funding of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, which will amount to 25 per cent. over three years, and the detrimental effect that that will have on such institutes in Aberystwyth? Will he continue his dialogue with the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and his colleagues at the STFC in order to find us some alternative funding?

Huw Irranca-Davies: My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I will always continue such discussions, but I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will welcome the fact that in the 2005-06 academic year, for the very first time, Welsh universities accounted for 11 per cent. of UK-wide income from collaborative research, outperforming six of the nine English regional development agency regions. Wales is doing very well in research, but it must do more, and we will continue to support Wales as it drives forward in the knowledge economy.

Hywel Francis: The Secretary of State has long been a champion of higher education in Wales, particularly with regard to its support of the knowledge economy. Does my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary agree that the forthcoming inquiry by the Select Committee on Welsh Affairs into cross-border issues affords the Wales Office and the DIUS a unique opportunity to give evidence on how we can best address the question of the research funding deficit in Wales? In so doing, we can help to strengthen the link between technology transfer and research funding in order to advance the cause of the knowledge economy in Wales.

Huw Irranca-Davies: Indeed; my hon. Friend's commitment to higher education and his background in HE in Wales are well known, and the Wales Office would welcome any opportunity to appear before the Welsh Affairs Committee to give evidence to that very important inquiry into the future of skills and knowledge in Wales. I know that he will welcome the recent substantial increase in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform science and innovation budget—an increase from £5.4 billion in 2007 to £6.3 billion in 2010-11. That is positive news for Welsh HE, delivered under a Labour Government.

Manufacturing

Nigel Evans: What discussions he has had with the First Minister on the manufacturing industry in Wales.

Peter Hain: Periodic ones. I have never known Welsh questions to be so popular, and I welcome everybody.

Nigel Evans: Since the right hon. Gentleman took the position of Secretary of State for Wales in 2002, more than 23,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost. Those who lost their jobs would not have been reassured to learn that when the Secretary of State should have been looking after their interests he had two jobs and was seeking another, the handling of which was described by the Prime Minister yesterday as incompetent. Given the Secretary of State's growing lack of credibility and the mire that now surrounds him, would not the best prospect for new jobs in Wales be for him to quit his two jobs today?

Peter Hain: Thanks for that supporting question. Let me give the hon. Gentleman a quote:
	"Wales has got a huge amount going for it...Wales has got great universities, a vibrant business sector, a tradition of excellence in engineering and manufacturing."
	Those are not my words, but those of the Leader of the Opposition only last month.

Martin Caton: Unemployment in Gower is now considerably less than half of what it was in 1997. However, at the beginning of this week, we learned from 3 Ms, a flagship manufacturer in Gower, that it is reviewing some operations in the Gorseinon factory. Will my right hon. Friend meet me to discuss the future of 3 Ms in Gorseinon?

Peter Hain: I will be happy to do so. I remind my hon. Friend and everybody that Wales is a great place to do business at the moment. Only recently, the Royal Bank of Scotland found that manufacturing output continues to expand. The business climate is excellent. Wales is going from strength to strength, despite global uncertainty and financial instability. Everybody, including manufacturers, should come to Wales, because it is the best place to be.

Elfyn Llwyd: Given that between June 1999 and June 2007 21 per cent. of manufacturing jobs were lost in Wales, does the Secretary of State agree that it is excellent news that Rigcycle Ltd has bought two quarries in Blaenau Ffestiniog and one in Penrhyn in Bethesda? Will he do all he can with his colleagues in the National Assembly to assist the company to expand even further? Does he agree that, Welsh slate, as a premier product, could do with more advertising worldwide?

Peter Hain: I completely agree. As the hon. Gentleman knows better than anybody, the opportunity for Welsh slate is great. We should work together—I know that the Welsh Assembly Government will work with us—to advance the prospects of Welsh slate. I congratulate him on his work; we should ensure that the initiative in his constituency goes from strength to strength.

Don Touhig: My right hon. Friend knows that General Dynamics in my constituency leads a £60 million defence research consortium with the Ministry of Defence, involving the universities of Cardiff, Cambridge and Imperial. What are the Government doing to ensure that the innovative ideas that come from that research benefit manufacturing industries in Wales?

Peter Hain: My right hon. Friend will remember that I visited that factory with him. It is a fine example of manufacturing excellences in Wales, along with many others, such as the European Aeronautic Defence and Space company—EADS—which I visited, Airbus, the Metrix consortium and Visteon, with which I have worked. We will work closely with him and General Dynamics to see what opportunities there are. We will continue to invest in higher education and in skills and high technology to ensure that global companies such as General Dynamics continue to view Wales as an excellent base from which to operate.

Cheryl Gillan: When supporting manufacturing business in Wales, on what basis do Wales Office Ministers decide whether to give a personal endorsement to a manufacturing or other commercial operation in Wales, such as the Cuddy group? Does the Secretary of State have any regrets about the business endorsements that he has made as Secretary of State for Wales in the past two years?

Peter Hain: I have absolutely no regrets— [Interruption.]—about the business endorsements that I have given in Wales.  [Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker: Order. The House should allow the Secretary of State to answer.

Peter Hain: I was asked about the business endorsements in Wales that I gave as Secretary of State. I am proud to visit companies, whether manufacturers such as General Dynamics, construction companies such as Cuddy's, or financial companies such as Picture Financial, which create more jobs. I have often accepted invitations from hon. Members who represent Welsh constituencies. It is right that the Secretary of State for Wales gives his support to the growth and success of Welsh business.
	Let me give the hon. Lady a quote:
	"Most of the manufacturing capacity in sectors which are globally uncompetitive has already moved offshore, and the smaller manufacturing sector which remains in the UK is much better positioned to compete."
	The CBI Wales director, David Rosser, made that statement only a month ago, speaking from Wales.

Cheryl Gillan: In the light of the Secretary of State's enthusiasm, will he arrange for the publication of all exchanges with the permanent secretary responsible for the Wales Office that relate to his dealings with businesses, especially those that he has endorsed, so that we can reassure manufacturing business that his Department is both competent and free of bias?

Peter Hain: Let me say this to the hon. Lady: if she were doing my job, which she wants to do, I would perceive it as her duty to accept invitations from successful Welsh businesses—manufacturers and others—to give them support. Why is she attacking that?
	She should applaud the statement that,
	"the business sector in Wales seems to be going from strength to strength."
	It was made by Professor Dylan Jones-Evans, the director of the national entrepreneurship observatory for Wales and Conservative candidate for Clwyd, West in last year's Assembly elections.

Nia Griffith: I compliment my right hon. Friend on his effective liaison with colleagues in the Welsh Assembly Government. What discussions has he had with Welsh Assembly Government colleagues about using the framework powers in the Education and Skills Bill to redress the gender imbalance and encourage more young women to take up apprenticeships and careers in manufacturing?

Peter Hain: As my hon. Friend knows, we have had regular discussions—I with the First Minister and others with the Welsh Assembly Government—about the Bill. She is right: it is essential that we get more young women especially into apprenticeships. I remember visiting a training centre in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig), where I had a discussion with a training official who was trying to persuade young girls to switch from hairdressing into plumbing, making it clear that it offered more opportunities for flexible working and greater wealth.  [ Interruption. ] Conservative Members are decrying the opportunities for young women in Wales that this Labour Government are providing, when they should be supporting them.

Local Government Funding

Simon Hughes: What discussions he has had with the First Minister on financial allocations to local councils in Wales; and if he will make a statement.

Huw Irranca-Davies: Regular discussions take place with the First Minister on such matters. The Welsh Assembly Government have delivered, including in their announcement yesterday, a realistic settlement for local government that represents a fair deal for Wales.

Simon Hughes: Given that the Wales Office budget has doubled and that there are £40 million of reserves in the Welsh Assembly accounts, was it incompetence or intentional that the Secretary of State and the First Minister delivered a below-inflation settlement for the 22 Welsh councils, which means that front-line services the length and breadth of Wales will be at risk in the coming year?

Huw Irranca-Davies: I honestly thought that the hon. Gentleman was going to echo the sentiments of the individual who said:
	"We are delighted that the many representations by the council's elected members and others on its behalf have been recognised and responded to in this way."
	That was said by a spokesman for Powys county council yesterday. The Welsh Assembly will ensure that all councils receive an increase in funds of at least 2 per cent. An extra £4.7 million was announced yesterday by Finance Minister Andrew Davies, which will mean an average rise of 2.4 per cent. Councils such as Powys and Ynys Môn, which had been allocated 1 per cent., will benefit greatly. I honestly thought that the hon. Gentleman might mention that.

Albert Owen: My hon. Friend is right. I thank him and the Secretary of State, who has an excellent record on delivering for Ynys Môn and its people, for the flooring in the mechanism. It is important that that flooring continues over the comprehensive spending review period, as the Home Office has provided for police authorities in Wales, so that local authorities can plan year on year and deliver adequate services. Will the Wales Office liaise with the Welsh Assembly Government to ensure that that happens?

Huw Irranca-Davies: My hon. Friend has been one of the most powerful advocates in recent days and weeks on the issue, and I know that he will have welcomed yesterday's announcement. We will continue to argue strongly for a fair deal for Wales. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has visited my hon. Friend's constituency, and so have I. Perhaps I could extend an invitation to the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) to visit Bridgend, which has one of the best settlements in Wales, but which is in the shameful position of having the lowest spending on primary schools in Wales. Will he please visit and explain to the Lib-Dem leadership there what it needs to do right?

David Davies: The Minister will know that the funding formula is skewed against rural authorities in Wales, which is why Monmouthshire has had the highest council tax increase of any authority in the United Kingdom over the past 10 years. Will he do something about that—if in a short while he wields greater influence in the Wales Office than he does at the moment?

Huw Irranca-Davies: The hon. Gentleman fails to mention, as he once again launches into a diatribe against the Welsh Assembly and everything Welsh, that the last three financial years have seen the lowest council tax rises since the council tax was introduced in Wales. What a contrast with the Conservative years.

Roger Williams: Despite the small improvements announced yesterday, many councils still face very tight financial settlements that are leading them to consider cuts in services or increases in council tax. What discussions has the Minister had with his Assembly colleagues to ensure that Welsh councils will be able to deliver on the equal pay agenda, so that women who have been disadvantaged for so long can now get equal pay for equal work? Or does he have some other funds for these progressive policies?

Huw Irranca-Davies: The hon. Gentleman raises a vital point, and I assure him that we raise these issues continually with Welsh Assembly Government Ministers and with the Welsh Local Government Association, whose representatives I met on Monday. There is a determination to deliver on equal pay, as there should be, and we will deliver it—I hope with cross-party support—because we have a Labour-led Administration with Plaid Cymru in Wales, and a Labour Government here.

Chris Ruane: The Minister will be aware that the Welsh block grant rose from £6.5 billion in 1997 to more than £14 billion this year. Yes, we need more money, but does he agree that the issue in Wales is how to get value for money from our local authorities? What discussions is he having with his Welsh Assembly colleagues to ensure that we get value for money in Wales?

Huw Irranca-Davies: My hon. Friend is entirely correct that we must not only deliver the investment in Wales, as the Labour Government are doing, but ensure that the right reforms and efficiencies are in place. In the Finance Minister's statement yesterday, he made it clear that the extra investment will go hand in hand with efficiencies, reforms and delivery. I know that my hon. Friend will also welcome the announcement in this budget of in excess of £1.2 billion extra for health; a substantial increase in the number of apprenticeships, with an extra £25 million over the next three years; £6 million extra for alcohol and drug rehabilitation; and £120 million for affordable child care. Why are all those announcements significant? It is because they are being delivered under Labour.

Devolved Government

Andrew Rosindell: What his policy is on increasing the National Assembly for Wales's legislative competence.

Peter Hain: We are committed to giving the National Assembly for Wales new law-making powers through the provisions of the Government of Wales Act 2006.

Andrew Rosindell: I thank the Secretary of State for his reply, but does he accept that there has been no consultation among the people of Wales on the new powers for the Assembly? Why will he not allow the people of Wales to choose, in a referendum, whether they want the Assembly to have those powers?

Peter Hain: Parliament is the proper source for granting extra powers and passing the legislation so to do. The powers that are now being exercised through Orders in Council and the framework powers being established in primary legislation are within the terms of the settlement endorsed by the people of Wales in a referendum in 1997, which the hon. Gentleman's party opposed.

David Jones: Last year, the Welsh Assembly Government applied to the Wales Office for framework powers conferring legislative competence to be included in the Planning Bill. Six months later, the Bill has had its Second Reading and is now in Committee, yet the draft clauses relating to those powers have still not been produced. Will the Secretary of State please tell us whether that unacceptable delay is the product of deliberate policy, administrative oversight or simple incompetence?

Peter Hain: As the hon. Gentleman knows—I think that he was present for it—there was a briefing on the Planning Bill given by my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Wales and the Minister concerned last week. At that briefing, it was explained why the complexities involved meant that the framework clause was not yet ready. When it is ready, the hon. Gentleman will be given an opportunity, as will his hon. Friends and all other Members who have an interest, to question the Ministers concerned. The measure will be subject to proper scrutiny, as it will be throughout the process as it goes into the Bill and is debated in the House.

Ryder Cup

Paul Flynn: What discussions he has had on preparations for the Ryder cup to be held in Newport in 2010.

Huw Irranca-Davies: My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I have regular discussions with colleagues in the Welsh Assembly Government and elsewhere about issues affecting Wales, including the preparation for major events. In fact, I am planning to meet representatives of Ryder cup Wales in the near future to discuss the preparations for 2010.

Paul Flynn: Will my hon. Friend redouble his efforts to ensure that the great enthusiasm of all of Wales for the Ryder cup is shared by people throughout the UK? Is he looking forward, as I am, to that glorious day in 2010—a few months after the next general election—when I, the newly re-elected Member for Newport, West, will welcome the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr. Hain) to Newport to congratulate him on his eighth successive year of distinguished service as Secretary of State for Wales?

Huw Irranca-Davies: My right hon. Friend, who has been a huge supporter of the Ryder cup, will indeed look forward to that glorious day and to the re-election of my hon. Friend. Certainly, the Ryder cup is welcomed across Wales and the UK—with its massive investment in infrastructure and jobs, the involvement of the private sector in Newport, and new hotel development. It is a great tribute to the work that Wales has done in remodelling itself as the venue for top-class sporting events.

Adam Price: Of course, the Ryder cup will not be a success if people are unable to get to it, so will the Minister give an assurance that the construction of Crossrail along the Great Western main line, which is due to commence in 2010, will not cause huge disruption to train services from Paddington to Newport?

Huw Irranca-Davies: The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point and I am happy to take up that issue. It is important to have the infrastructure in place so that people can make use of it. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will welcome not only the massive investment in Newport but the legacy of the Ryder cup in Wales, the wider investment in golf across Wales and the fact that Wales now stages the rugby world cup, the Heineken cup final, the FA cup final and the Wales rally GB. Wales is now truly the destination for world-class sporting events.

Madeleine Moon: What assessment has been made of the impact of the 2010 Ryder cup on my constituency in respect of economic, tourism, social and sporting prowess? Bridgend has some of the best golf courses in the UK, including the Royal Porthcawl, which is very popular with the Japanese ambassador, who regularly plays there.

Huw Irranca-Davies: My hon. Friend is unusually well informed about the activities of the Japanese ambassador, but it is indeed true that he plays there every month. It is estimated that the Ryder cup brought £88 million into the Irish economy in the tournament week alone and studies are progressing on how much it will bring into the wider Welsh economy and Bridgend. I have no doubt that our success in getting the Ryder cup will once again put us at the highest level in attracting investment and providing a sporting legacy for Wales.

Environment

Gregory Barker: What recent discussions he has had with the First Minister on the environment in Wales.

Peter Hain: I have regular discussions, for instance on our joint support for the Severn barrage, which will be by far the biggest renewable energy project in Britain.

Gregory Barker: How will the opening, in the teeth of local opposition, of Britain's largest ever open-cast coal mine near Merthyr Tydfil help the UK meet its 2020 carbon reduction targets?

Peter Hain: There is still a demand—indeed, an increasing demand—for Welsh coal and proper environmental standards apply to such applications and projects. We will need to move towards clean coal through carbon capture and storage in order to ensure that, where coal makes a contribution to our future energy mix, it is clean.

Defence Training Programme

John Smith: What progress is being made on the Defence Training Programme at RAF St. Athan; and if he will make a statement.

Huw Irranca-Davies: I welcome the progress made so far on delivering an excellent package that meets our defence training needs. Work is expected to begin at St. Athan as early as next year.

John Smith: I thank my hon. Friend for that reply and I thank him and the Secretary of State for their work in attracting this multi-billion pound investment to Wales. If all of Wales is to benefit from it, we must get the planning right. Will my hon. Friend agree to meet me to discuss the local authority's planning strategy to ensure that it appreciates the sheer scale and strategic importance of this economy-changing development?

Huw Irranca-Davies: My hon. Friend once again proves why he recently won the campaigner of the year prize at the Welsh politicians' awards for his work on St. Athan. It was thoroughly deserved. I am more than happy to meet him once again, as will be my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. The St. Athan development will bring £11 billion-worth of investment, creating thousands of direct and indirect jobs from 2013. It is the largest single Government investment in Wales and is thoroughly to be welcomed.

Mark Pritchard: Is the Minister aware that, according to a recent survey by the Public and Commercial Services union, 72 per cent. of the defence personnel who are expected to move to Wales from RAF Cosford in my constituency are either unwilling or unable to do so? Is it not about time we were given some transparency in the planning problems mentioned by the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John Smith)?

Huw Irranca-Davies: The hon. Gentleman is a good advocate for his constituents. He will know that Cosford has been recommended for 102 Logistics Brigade and 1 Signal Brigade when they return from Germany, subject to development plans and value for money. If the defence community is located at Cosford, Metrix will remain committed to a learning centre and design facility there.
	I should welcome it if, for once, the hon. Gentleman actually stood up and said what a good job this is for Wales, particularly given his role on the Welsh Affairs Committee.

PRIME MINISTER

The Prime Minister was asked—

Engagements

Robert Flello: If he will list his official engagements for Wednesday 16 January.

Gordon Brown: This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in the House, I shall have further such meetings later today.

Robert Flello: Despite a decade of economic stability with low inflation and low interest rates, my constituents— [Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker: Order. Hon. Members must let the hon. Gentleman give his good news.

Robert Flello: Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
	Despite those achievements, my constituents are now understandably concerned about the way in which global economic issues affect them. How does my right hon. Friend feel that these events compare with those of the early 1990s, when Britain was plunged into recession after recession?

Gordon Brown: It is right that people are concerned about what is happening in the global economy, and it is right that people want to know, as a result of global financial turbulence, what will happen to our economy over the next few months. That is why I am pleased to say that yesterday's inflation figures showed that our inflation rate was 2.1 per cent., half the rate in America, and why I am also pleased to report that today's employment figures showed that employment had risen by 175,000 in the last quarter, and was up by a quarter of a million over the year. Unemployment is down, the claimant count is down and inactivity is down. Under our Government, unemployment is down and employment up: we have the best employment record in history.

David Cameron: Last year, the Government promised that they would get back all the taxpayers' money lent to Northern Rock. Can the Prime Minister tell us the exact amount of both the loans and the guarantees, and will he repeat today the pledge that all the taxpayers' money will be paid back?

Gordon Brown: That is our intention. If I may say so, I welcome the chance to bring the House up to date on what is happening with Northern Rock. Northern Rock shareholders and depositors were let down by bad management. It was a bad business plan.
	In September, the Leader of the Opposition was good enough to say that he overwhelmingly supported our action. The action that we took was first to ensure that there was stability in the economy, and we said that to ensure stability we would secure the deposits of all Northern Rock depositors. We also said that we would stand behind the company with support from the Bank of England. In the next few weeks we will consider how we can find buyers for Northern Rock, and I think everyone in the House would say that we should rule out no option in doing so. That is the right course to take.
	Let me tell all Members what comes first. We had to intervene to ensure stability, so that the instability of Northern Rock would not spread across the economy. That is what we have achieved over the past four months, and the Opposition should be supporting us, not criticising us.

David Cameron: I asked the Prime Minister a very specific question about the figures. I think that the taxpayers, each of whom is currently lending about £1,800 to this bank, would like the figures to be confirmed in the House of Commons. It has been reported that the taxpayer is exposed to the tune of £55 billion: £26 billion of emergency loans and £29 billion of guarantees. Will the Prime Minister confirm those specific figures?

Gordon Brown: The Governor of the Bank of England announces the figures on what is happening every week, but I have to ask the Leader of the Opposition: he said in September— [ Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker: Order. The Prime Minister is in order.

Gordon Brown: The Leader of the Opposition wholeheartedly supported our action. He said that it was right to inject "liquidity to Northern Rock". Is he changing his mind?

David Cameron: rose— [ Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker: Let the Leader of the Opposition answer in the way he wants to answer— [ Interruption.] Order. He does not have to answer the Prime Minister's question.

David Cameron: I asked the Prime Minister a specific question about the figures, which he simply could not bear to read out. That is what taxpayers who are worried about supporting the bank and about the extent of the support are asking about.
	Let me ask the Prime Minister something else. At the time that the guarantee was given, was he advised that the level of taxpayer support could reach this huge level of £55 billion?

Gordon Brown: I have said that we will do what is necessary to protect the stability of the economy. I do not apologise for taking the action that is necessary because it has ensured the stability of the economy. Perhaps the Leader of the Opposition will answer the question: does he still support our action?

David Cameron: For once, I did not ask the Prime Minister for an apology. I just asked him a straight question about the figures and whether he was advised about how bad it could be. He will not give an answer, so we do not know whether he was advised that the taxpayer could be in to the tune of £55 billion.
	Let me ask the Prime Minister another specific question and see whether he can answer this one. Can he give an assurance that the level of support required from the taxpayer cannot get any higher than £55 billion?

Gordon Brown: It is precisely for that reason that we do not provide a running commentary on figures. Under any Government, including the previous Government, it was not the practice to pre-empt what the Bank of England does, which is to announce the figures itself, but I have to return to this point. We intervened to ensure stability in the economy and to ensure that Northern Rock would not spread across the economy to the rest of the financial system. We also intervened to protect depositors. Both those objectives in the past four months have been achieved. Is the right hon. Gentleman now telling me that, from a position of wholeheartedly supporting that action, he is now against it—yes or no?

David Cameron: I will tell you what you did. When it came to the need for a total guarantee of deposits, you dithered and delayed. When it came to the opportunity of pushing for a sale with Lloyds TSB, you dithered and delayed, and when it came to the advice that you were getting to sell the bank straight after the bank run, you dithered and delayed. Why did you dither and delay? It was because you were planning a general election. Will the Prime Minister confirm that he received advice from his financial advisers to push for an immediate sale after the bank run?

Gordon Brown: No, and there was no offer from Lloyds TSB, as the right hon. Gentleman alleges. He should return to the substance of the issue: if we had not intervened to save Northern Rock, there was a danger that that would spread across the whole economy. He supported our doing that in September. Does he still support us now? If we had not intervened, depositors would have lost their money. Their money has been protected. He supported us in September on that. Does he support us now? I say that we have taken the right, consistent action in the interests of the stability of the economy. To go backwards and forwards as he is doing would put the stability of the economy at risk.

David Cameron: The substance of the issue is that it is the Prime Minister's regulatory system, it is his bank failure, it is his dithering, and it is his failure to deal with this issue. If it is the case, as he says, that he was not advised to go for an immediate sale, can he explain why the Bank of England was quoted as saying that he was
	"unable to focus because morale throughout the government is so low"?
	The fact is that we have had months of dithering and billions of pounds of taxpayers' money is at risk. Does the Prime Minister accept that, if nationalisation goes ahead, it will be a massive failure of Government policy and a fresh chapter in the incompetence of this Government?

Gordon Brown: The Bank of England supports our action, the Financial Services Authority supports our action, and the right hon. Gentleman used to support our action— [Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker: Order. Let the Prime Minister speak.

Gordon Brown: The Bank of England supports our action, the Financial Services Authority supports our action, and the Opposition used to support our action. I have looked at the policy of the Opposition between Sunday and Wednesday: on Sunday, the right hon. Gentleman said he was against nationalisation; on Monday at his press conference he said, perhaps by mistake, that we should look at nationalisation; and on Tuesday night's "Newsnight" the shadow Chancellor said that we should look at administration, which is a route to a fire sale of the asset. They change their position every day; the only change they represent is that they change their positions all the time. We are for stability; they would bring instability.

Ian Davidson: Were the Prime Minister and his Government aware of his predecessor's plan to attend the conference of the main party of the French right to announce his candidacy for the presidency of the European Union, as a prelude to his candidacy for the presidency of the world, the universe and everything? Did the Prime Minister know of that intended candidacy when his predecessor was negotiating the European constitution, and did that not represent a conflict of interests?

Gordon Brown: My right hon. Friend the former Prime Minister is doing a wonderful job because he is speaking up for peace in the middle east; I approve of his taking up any opportunity he gets to put his advocacy of a peaceful settlement for the middle east, and he was right to do so.

Nigel Waterson: On new year's day, little Hermione Bateman was born, 11 weeks prematurely. She is alive today only because of the prompt expert help she received from my local hospital. Is the Prime Minister aware that in 15 months' time a baby such as Hermione will have to be taken 21 miles to Hastings to access such emergency care? Why are babies' lives being put at risk in this way?

Gordon Brown: I am aware of the issues the hon. Gentleman raises, but the recommendations on the reconfiguration of maternity services were made by consultants and clinicians on the ground, and they are in the interests of the safety of all patients, all mothers, and all daughters and sons who are born. I hope that, on reflection, the hon. Gentleman will look at the massive investment we are making in the national health service, both in his area and in other areas. There are six new hospital developments in the whole of the region that he represents, and there have been 7,000 new staff, and waiting times of six months or more, of which there were 30,000 in 1997, are down to 57. That is what the health service is achieving.

Jimmy Hood: Does the Prime Minister agree that the security of supply of electricity generation is a priority for any country's well-being and true independence? Can the Prime Minister assure me that the Energy Bill, which gets its Second Reading next Tuesday, will protect the Scottish economy from any political gerrymandering of the planning laws envisaged by the Scottish National party Administration in Edinburgh?

Gordon Brown: My hon. Friend takes a great interest in energy matters. The availability of secure energy is one of the big issues affecting this country, and it is what led to the energy White Paper last week, to our decision on nuclear power, and to our decisions to extend renewable sources of energy, to make ourselves less dependent on foreign sources of energy and to cut the carbon that is used in energy. I hope that every part of the United Kingdom will feel able to support all those decisions.

Nicholas Clegg: The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors says that home repossessions will rocket this year by 50 per cent., with one repossession every 12 minutes. What comfort can the Prime Minister offer the 45,000 British families who now face the prospect of losing their homes this year?

Gordon Brown: What I can say to them is that we are determined to have low interest rates; to have low interest rates we have to have low inflation; and to have low inflation we have to have a decent economic policy, which I am afraid the hon. Gentleman's party does not have.

Nicholas Clegg: The reality is that the Prime Minister allowed, on his watch, grossly irresponsible lending practices by banks to destabilise the housing market. Will he act now to ensure that mortgage lenders take their responsibilities seriously and do more to stop evictions, or will he just sit there wringing his hands while British families lose their homes?

Gordon Brown: I think that the hon. Gentleman forgets that there are 1.5 million more home owners under a Labour Government than there were before our Government started. We have extended home ownership to all regions of the country and to people who previously could not afford it.
	I have been given a copy of the dossier on the hon. Gentleman that, unfortunately, was prepared by the person sitting next to him, who suggests that on every major economic and social issue the leader of the Liberal party has flip-flopped, and keeps flip-flopping.

Jeff Ennis: Following on from the point raised by the leader of the Liberal Democrats, may I ask the Prime Minister whether he is aware of the very positive impact that this Government's housing market renewal programme is having in former mining areas, such as Grimethorpe and Thurnscoe in the Barnsley area of my constituency and Mexborough in the Doncaster area of my constituency, in terms of future housing provision? Does he agree that such a programme has to be built around a principle of community sustainability and against a backdrop of a sound and stable economy, which this Government have provided for the past 11 years?

Gordon Brown: I am grateful to my hon. Friend because, as he says, massive housing investment has been made in his constituency—this is the answer to the Liberal party's point—and that housing investment will continue with £1 billion more provided in the next three years. We are determined to remove substandard housing, to have more affordable housing and to extend home ownership, but that is possible only if we run a strong economy. I say to all Members of this House that ours is the country that has managed to have low inflation at the start of this year, half that of America, and at the same time has seen jobs expanding when unemployment is rising in America and in other countries, and that gives me hope that our economy can withstand what is clearly global financial turbulence.

Philip Dunne: The Prime Minister has made it clear that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is a dead man walking, so what arrangements is he making for a competency transplant?

Gordon Brown: When it comes to the work of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, unemployment is down; employment is up; more single parents are in jobs; fewer people are claiming incapacity benefit; more long-term unemployed people are getting back to work; and, since my right hon. Friend became Secretary of State, hundreds of contracts have been signed with local employers to get thousands of people back to work. That is why I have confidence in what he is doing.

Darfur

David Taylor: What recent assessment he has made of the humanitarian situation in Darfur.

Gordon Brown: We continue to monitor the humanitarian situation in Darfur. Some 4 million people are dependent on food aid, 2 million people have been displaced and 280,000 people have had to leave the country. We continue to work with the United Nations and the African Union to bring peace to that troubled region.

David Taylor: The fact that the Darfur genocide is now entering its sixth year is largely down to the UN Security Council, especially China, which has blocked or diluted efforts to stop the violence, leading the Khartoum regime to treat the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur protection force with contempt. Will my right hon. Friend say how he will tackle the continued failure of the UN to secure compliance with its own edicts and decisions, so that the looming threat of the withdrawal of humanitarian organisations such as Médecins sans Frontières can be avoided?

Gordon Brown: I praise my hon. Friend for his long-standing commitment to, and interest in, the area of Darfur and the problems that people are facing. As I said a minute ago, the problems are appalling and run to hundreds of thousands of people having been displaced or being on aid.
	My hon. Friend mentions China. I talked to the Premier of China this morning about this very issue, because I believe that China and the United Kingdom can work with other countries to make sure that the Government of Sudan ensure that a ceasefire is properly administered, to bring in the African Union peacekeeping force, which is supported by the United Nations—20,000 more peacekeepers—and to move towards political talks that can bring a political settlement, where all parties, including those that did not attend the previous talks, are brought to the table. On my visit to China, I intend to continue the talks with Premier Wen so that all of us, including the Chinese Government, add to the pressure for a peaceful settlement in Darfur.

Engagements

Anne McIntosh: The Prime Minister talks about low inflation, but the cost of living index is rising hugely. Food prices have gone up 7 per cent., energy prices have gone up 15 per cent. and petrol product prices have risen by more than 20 per cent. Why is the rate of inflation running at a higher rate now than the one his Government inherited?

Gordon Brown: But it is not. Inflation is 2.1 per cent. The hon. Lady makes an important point: energy prices have been rising—coal, oil and gas—by 60 to 80 per cent. in every part of the world. Food prices have been rising as a result of what has happened to the harvest. Therefore, it is all the more remarkable that our inflation is 2.1 per cent., when it is 3 per cent. in the euro area and 4 per cent. in America, on the same comparable index. That is why we have been able to bring down interest rates in the past few months, but they have not been able to do so in the euro area. We approach the global financial turbulence with low inflation, low interest rates and high employment, and if we can make the right long-term decisions on the economy, we can withstand the global financial turbulence. To say that oil and other commodity prices are going up and that we still have low inflation shows the achievement in getting inflation down.

Keith Vaz: On Monday, the Prime Minister said that he was very worried about the content of video and computer games. Some of those games, such as Manhunt 2, depict scenes of torture and murder using hammers, knives and guns. They seem to make a virtue of gratuitous and graphic violence. Will he meet a delegation of Members, including the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier), who has a private Member's Bill on the subject, to see what further steps the industry can take to show better responsibility? Does my right hon. Friend, as a parent, agree that—

Mr. Speaker: Order. Other hon. Members want to be called.

Gordon Brown: My right hon. Friend is right, and this is an issue that concerns all parties in the House and every parent. It is right that we look again at the classification system for those games and at what is happening on the internet in influencing young children. That is why the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families has set up the Byron review, in which Dr. Tanya Byron is looking at these very issues. We want children to be able to enjoy the benefits of the internet and video games, without being influenced by the pornography or violence of them. Dr. Byron will report in March 2008 and while it would be premature for me to say what she is likely to recommend, the classification system is one of the things that she is looking at. I hope that when we get the report we can have a debate in this House. I would be happy to meet my right hon. Friend's delegation and move forward whatever changes in the law are necessary.

Andrew Selous: Last Saturday, three children in my constituency had their grandmother murdered by their father, Gary Weddell, who then committed suicide, after he had been granted bail after being charged with the murder of his wife, the mother of the children concerned. Will the Prime Minister please ensure that the case is looked into, so that lessons are learnt and so that no other family has to endure a similar tragedy?

Gordon Brown: This is indeed a set of tragic circumstances that are almost difficult even to contemplate—that someone was let out on bail and then apparently is alleged to have murdered his mother-in-law and then to have taken his own life. The question is why bail was given. It is not in the power of the Government to give bail, although of course it is up to us to look at any laws affecting that. It was a decision by the judge, who set down an amount of money and probably took into account the fact that the man was a policeman. Those are the things that we have to look at, and if any changes in the law are necessary, we will make them.

Phil Wilson: Does my right hon. Friend agree that we can invest £8.4 billion in the supply of social housing over the next three years because of this Government's sound stewardship of the economy, which is very different from the Tory record? It is because of their neglect that there was a £19 billion housing repair bill when they left office.

Gordon Brown: I hope that all parties will welcome the 50 per cent. increase in social housing that we are about to bring about through the measures that we are taking in the public spending review. I hope particularly that young couples will benefit from the supply both of affordable rented housing and of affordable housing to buy. I hope that the Opposition will reconsider their policy of opposing many of the housing measures that are intended to deliver more housing space for more people in this country.

Susan Kramer: The Plain English Campaign today described the consultation on Heathrow expansion as atrocious and said:
	"This document effectively takes away human rights...No ordinary person could be expected to read and understand this".
	Will the Prime Minister please instruct the Department for Transport to withdraw the consultation until it can be written in comprehensible language, and will he tell Ministers and officials that it is a disgrace that none of them will attend a single public meeting on that crucial point?

Gordon Brown: The hon. Lady gives the impression that because of the wording of the document she does not understand the issue at stake, which is whether there will be a new runway at Heathrow. The consultation is there for the public to involve themselves in. I hope that people will join it vigorously, and then a decision can be made.

Mike Hall: Daresbury laboratory in my constituency has been carrying out world-leading scientific research for 46 years. The science and innovation campus at Daresbury is a huge success, attracting science and high-tech businesses and creating high-quality jobs. Two reviews are about to take place—the McKillop review and the light source review—both of which will have an impact on the future of Daresbury laboratory. The knee-jerk reaction of the Science and Technology Facilities Council to cut research grants by 25 per cent. and staff by 25 per cent. to meet an £80 million shortfall in its £1.9 billion budget is a cause for concern—

Mr. Speaker: Order. I must stop the hon. Gentleman. His question was too long; he must be briefer.

Gordon Brown: Daresbury is a world-class facility. I am proud that we have such a facility in our country and in the north-west region, as well as an innovation centre that is world beating and path breaking in its research. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that there are two reviews. The McKillop review will consider how best we can meet the future needs of Daresbury. We have increased the amount of money to be spent on the Science and Technology Facilities Council by 13 per cent. during the spending review period. I hope that we will be able to see an expansion of the work done at Daresbury, which will benefit the whole country.

Brian Binley: Question 11, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker: The hon. Gentleman must go straight on to the question.

Brian Binley: I apologise, Mr. Speaker. There are times when I am on another planet; that was one of them.
	Will the Prime Minister assure us that Mr. Stephen Carter, his chosen nominee for Northern Rock, has no residual interest whatsoever in Brunswick Group?

Gordon Brown: Mr. Carter is not responsible for Northern Rock.

Barbara Keeley: In my constituency, people living in the most deprived areas have a life expectancy seven years shorter than those in the most affluent areas a couple of miles away, yet national reports have indicated that they could have many years added to their lifespan if they made some lifestyle changes. Will my right hon. Friend assure me that in years to come the NHS will reach out to my constituents and advise them on how to change their lifestyles so that they can lead healthier and longer lives?

Gordon Brown: I praise the work that my hon. Friend does in the health service, in particular among carers. We attended a seminar on that issue in Leeds on Friday, where carers asked us to do more to make their lives better, particularly with respite care. As far as inequalities and life chances are concerned, we are putting forward measures for check-ups, screening and preventive vaccines so that people can identify their risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer. That will save lives, particularly in the communities that my hon. Friend is talking about.

Edward Leigh: What was the point of invading Iraq, which led to the deaths of 150,000 Iraqis, just to hand over Basra to militant Shi'a militias while the army is holed up in the airport?

Gordon Brown: Violence in Basra has gone down by 90 per cent. over the past few months. Our troops there are doing a great job in training the Iraqi army's security forces and the Iraqi police. It is wrong for the hon. Gentleman to diminish the effect of building economic prosperity in the Basra area. As for invading Iraq in the first place, Saddam Hussein had offended UN resolutions and the international community for more than a decade.

John Heppell: Although I do not foresee any great demand for my kidneys or liver, may I welcome the Prime Minister's proposals on human transplants? On a much more serious note, will he act on the matter urgently, as people are dying every day for lack of donors?

Gordon Brown: As my hon. Friend knows, a report on organ donations is to be published today. It will recommend ways to increase the number of people prepared, under the present system, to give their organs when they die to save other people's lives. More than 1,000 people lose their lives each year because no organs are available for transplant. Another report on this matter will be prepared later this year, and one proposal that may be worth discussing then is that, while people may opt out of organ donation, there could be a family veto on whether organ donation can go ahead. I believe that that would satisfy many religious objections, while at the same time ensuring that thousands of people are saved as a result of organ donations being available. I hope that there will be all-party support for taking action.

Gary Streeter: Following the Government's recent naval base review, there was widespread concern at Plymouth's Devonport naval base that ships currently based there could be moved to Portsmouth in the next few years. Will the Prime Minister reassure the base's work force that their reward for generations of dedicated service to this nation's security will not be simply death by a thousand cuts?

Gordon Brown: As the hon. Gentleman knows, Plymouth will refit the Trident submarine, and it has a huge amount of work in the years ahead. A massive amount of investment has gone into Plymouth, and I can assure him of our commitment to the dock yard there. At the same time, he will acknowledge that that commitment is possible only because we are spending more on defence every year. We will continue to do so, and that depends on there being a healthy economy.

Point of Order

Michael Fabricant: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Could you use this opportunity to reiterate your ruling on the reading of questions by hon. Members on the Back Benches, whereas you allow questions to be read at the Dispatch Box?

Mr. Speaker: I object to notes when an hon. Member reads from the top of the page to the bottom, and in effect reads the notes into the record. Hon. Members on the Back Benches can glance at a note if they are dealing with figures or any other matters that must be precise. As for the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister, I let them have their way for half an hour. That is the best thing that I can say.

Education (Children with Autism)

Lee Scott: I beg to move,
	That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision about the education and training of children with autism and Asperger's syndrome; and for connected purposes.
	I recognise and welcome the fact that more money is being spent on special educational needs provision in our schools. Even so, local education authorities are compelled to make tough decisions about what they will prioritise and where they will spend the money. We can all appreciate the very great pressures on school budgets, but money allocated for SEN in our country must not be used for other purposes. We will not be able to deliver on our educational promises to such children and their families if we allow that misdirection of money to continue. The funding must be ring-fenced, and that is one element of the Bill. We also need to ensure that it is being spent as efficiently as it should be.
	The early diagnosis of children with autistic spectrum disorders is absolutely vital. It is difficult, if not impossible, to plan an effective educational strategy for a pupil with ASD until there has been a full assessment of the child's condition. We in this country are frequently slow in making that assessment, and local councils and health authorities must both be encouraged to speed up the process. Internationally, there are a number of countries where the process takes place far earlier and far more effectively than it does here in the UK. We should examine and adopt best practice from overseas, and that means looking at what goes on in countries such as Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Israel. Early diagnosis of an ASD not only helps children and their families but saves money over years of schooling.
	There is a real, pressing need for improved teacher training on ASDs. A survey by the National Union of Teachers found that 44 per cent. of teachers are not confident about teaching children with an autistic spectrum disorder, 39 per cent. are not confident about identifying children with an ASD and 76 per cent. said that a lack of professional development on the subject was a barrier to teaching children with an ASD. We must ensure that all teachers can do so. As about one in 100 children have some form of ASD, every teacher in every school can expect to teach children who are autistic.
	Recent developments with regard to teacher training have been welcome. There are now pilot projects in which special educational needs are made part of initial teacher training; however, it is essential that the issue should become part of all teacher training at all levels. We must also ensure that teachers have access to high quality in-service training. Such measures would go a long way to increase teachers' confidence when working with pupils with an ASD. We also need to ensure that all special educational needs co-ordinators have in-depth training on autism. We must recognise that with the right teaching regime, many children with an ASD are capable of moving on to further and higher education, which means that our colleges and universities must take on board lessons about how to teach young adults with Asperger's or autism.
	For the parents of an autistic child, exclusion from school is a very real concern. Some 27 per cent. of children with autism have been excluded, and 23 per cent. have been excluded more than once. We must acknowledge the special nature of such cases and place a requirement on schools under which, if any child with special educational needs is at risk of being excluded, there must be a review of provision before exclusion takes place.
	A range of special educational needs provision is needed, as one size simply does not fit all. Research by the National Autistic Society found that more than half of such children attend a type of school that their parents believe does not provide the best support for them. Parents of autistic children need to be given a choice in education provision and assistance in making that choice an informed one. The National Autistic Society and local organisations such as Supporting Together those with Autism and Asperger's in Redbridge, or STAAR, do a first-class job advising parents, but more support is needed from within the education system. Parents have every right to expect that the school will keep them informed regularly about how the school is supporting the child's special needs, as well as about the child's educational progress.
	The Warnock report of 1978 made the case for including children with special needs in mainstream schools, a view that has influenced education policy ever since. However, more recently, Baroness Warnock urged the Government to review that policy. Including pupils with special educational needs in mainstream schools is understandable, but not always desirable for such children or for the children with whom they are taught. For some children, a more specialised environment is required if their schooling is to progress. In my constituency, two schools—Little Heath school and Hatton school—provide first-class educational facilities for children with special educational needs. For that, I congratulate the London borough of Redbridge, which should be commended.
	We must put in place sensible measures that encourage and reward local authorities that work together to provide a wide range of high quality special educational needs provision. In areas where such provision is not available, parents and children may be forced to make unacceptably long journeys to get to a suitable school. I have heard reports of children travelling for up to two hours to get to a school that provides the education that they need. That is not acceptable.
	The Disabled Persons (Services, Consultation and Representation) Act 1986 and the special educational needs code of practice already require that young people with a statement should have an assessment of their needs as a disabled adult when they leave school. However, that is not always enough to ensure a smooth transition from school to adulthood. A recent National Autistic Society report noted that only half of those with statements were issued with transition plans, and that 45 per cent. of them were dissatisfied with the process. In this day and age, that is not good enough.
	There is a real need to make available high quality training for young adults with ASD so that they can be assisted into work. Many, with the right support and the right environment, can successfully make the transition into employment. Some companies and organisations are providing suitable and rewarding employment for those with ASD, but not enough to meet the demand. We must do more to encourage employers to consider making more posts available for adults with ASD, and we must give them more support in providing long-term employment. I have had personal experience of a young adult who was taken on board by one of our blue chip companies and is now not only holding down a responsible job, but living alone and leading a productive life. We must make sure that that happens more frequently.
	It must be a concern for us all that individuals pass through both the education and the health systems with autistic spectrum disorders that go unrecognised. As adults, some of those are misdiagnosed as having a mental health problem, such as schizophrenia. I know of many cases where such people have languished in prison for several years, and some are still languishing in prison. They can find themselves being prescribed drugs that are completely inappropriate for their true condition.
	Existing legislation, guidance and codes of conduct are far from silent on what services and assistance should be made available to autistic children and their families. There is no lack of good will, but often we fail to follow through existing laws and good intentions, and in these circumstances many children are being left behind. It is the concerns of the parents of autistic children that form the basis of this Bill. Naturally, they want the best for their children, as any of us would, and they have identified a number of ways in which that can be achieved.
	I thank parliamentary colleagues from both sides of the House who have been most generous with their support and their advice. This is not a party political matter and we can achieve real progress if we work together. I also thank Lord Adonis for meeting me last week and discussing the various issues that I raised. My Bill is a simple measure addressing a narrow range of matters, but it would move things in the right direction. For that reason, I urge the House to support it.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Lee Scott, John Bercow, Stephen Hammond, Bob Russell, Mr. Charles Walker, Mr. John Leech, Mr. Brian Binley, Mr. Iain Duncan Smith, Harry Cohen, Mr. Peter Bone, Mike Gapes and Philip Davies.

Education (Children with Autism)

Mr. Lee Scott accordingly presented a Bill to make provision about the education and training of children with autism and Asperger's syndrome; and for connected purposes: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 9 May, and to be printed [Bill 56].

Opposition Day
	 — 
	[6th allotted day]

National Insurance Numbers and Illegal Immigrants

Mr. Speaker: We now come to the first debate on the Opposition motions. I have selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

Chris Grayling: I beg to move,
	That this House expresses its very great concern that National Insurance numbers appear to have been issued to illegal immigrants.
	Britain today has nearly 5 million people claiming out-of-work benefits. Despite £3 billion spent on the Government's new deal, we have higher youth unemployment than 10 years ago. We have half a million people under the age of 35 claiming incapacity benefit. According to Ministers, a million IB claimants in all want to work. We have parts of Britain where as few as one in four adults of working age are working. We have a greater proportion of children being brought up in workless households than any other country in Europe.
	What are the Government doing? They are handing national insurance numbers to tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. Some people might call that incompetence. Just when the Secretary of State thought that things could not get any worse, the chaos spreads to another part of his job. What we know for certain is that 6,000 illegal immigrants have been issued with national insurance numbers by his Department, giving them an official stamp of approval to go and get a job. We have figures that strongly suggest that the real number is much higher. That is Britain today under this Government. All that happened while the Secretary of State was too busy getting on with his two jobs in government to sort out the confusion with his campaign finances. What utter chaos.
	To be frank, in the past few months we have seen a whole series of calamities for the Secretary of State on this important issue. We first had a sense that something was wrong last September, during the fiasco over the statistics on migrant workers; you will remember that, Mr. Speaker. The Secretary of State told us then that only 700,000 of the jobs created in Britain since 1997 had gone to migrant workers. We disputed his figure and suggested that the number was much higher. "No," said the Secretary of State, "It's 700,000." A month later he said, "We've got the figure wrong—it's not 700,000, but 1.1 million." We know that the Secretary of State is not much good at adding up, but losing 400,000 people is almost as improbable as losing £100,000 of campaign contributions. Even the 1.1 million figure may not be right; the Office for National Statistics has since told us that it thinks that as many as 80 per cent. of the new jobs created since 1997 may have gone to people moving to the UK from overseas. No wonder the Secretary of State wanted to keep things private. Can he really tell the House today exactly how many people from overseas have come to Britain to work in the past 10 years?
	Keeping things private is becoming a bit of a habit with the Secretary of State. We have been trying to get answers about national insurance numbers and this issue ever since it became clear, two months ago, that thousands of illegal workers were being cleared to work in the security industry. The written questions remain unanswered to this day. On 13 November last year, my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) asked the Home Secretary about the issue during questions on the Security Industry Authority. She waffled and said almost nothing, telling us that sharing intelligence would be important in the future. It seems that the Secretary of State is not alone in wanting to keep us guessing about what is really going on.
	I believe that yesterday's admission represents the tip of the iceberg of what is really going on with the Department for Work and Pensions' management of the system for migrant workers coming to Britain. We now know with cast-iron certainty that at least 6,000 people, illegally in the UK, have been given national insurance numbers by the Government. Yet nearly two years ago, the Government promised us that in future no national insurance numbers would be issued to anyone who did not have a right to work in the United Kingdom.
	If the Government had done their job, those latest revelations should not have been possible. On 5 June 2006, Ministers told both Houses of Parliament:
	"Any individual applying for a NINO"—
	that is, a national insurance number—
	"...who does not have the right to work here legally will be refused one."
	They passed regulations that were supposed to enforce that. The guidance notes state clearly that an individual applying for a national insurance number because they are in employment or self-employment must provide a specific document proving that they have the right to work in the United Kingdom. That was nearly two years ago, but we now know that every single one of the illegal immigrants in the security industry who caused such controversy before Christmas had been issued with national insurance numbers. Even when the regulations were passed, the Government strongly implied that the problem was small in scale. They had managed to find only about 3,000 cases in which something was amiss. It is now clear that that was a hopeless underestimate; the figure is much higher.

Peter Hain: The hon. Gentleman asked about an outstanding answer to a written question. May I give him the information? The answer has remained outstanding because it has taken time to understand the extent of the national insurance number-related element captured as part of the Security Industry Authority review. As the review is nearing its completion, we now have a better understanding of the issue and we will be making the necessary checks against the SIA data. That is the answer to the hon. Gentleman's question; we wanted to give an accurate one.

Chris Grayling: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for that answer. However, given that the Security Industry Authority said yesterday that every single one of those people had national insurance numbers, I am at a loss to see what review needed to take place, as all those people were affected.
	The original figure cited by the Government 18 months ago referred to 3,000 cases, but that is a hopeless underestimate of the level of the problem. Over the past three years, the Government have issued work permits to 270,000 people from outside the European economic area.

Henry Bellingham: My hon. Friend is making an extremely impressive case. Is he aware that the Department that is to reply to this debate estimated in May 2004 that there would probably be 15,000 workers from the EU accession countries working in this country, yet in fact the figure is nearly 700,000? Is it not deplorable that a Government Department got its figures so catastrophically wrong?

Chris Grayling: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for those comments, which amplify the point that the Department is in a state of chaos as regards dealing with the whole system of migrant workers coming to the UK to work.
	That is highlighted by the comparison between the number of work permits issued and the number of national insurance numbers issued. Over the past three years, 270,000 people from outside the European economic area have been given work permits by this Government—

Paul Flynn: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Chris Grayling: I will in a moment; let me just repeat this figure to the hon. Gentleman, because he may be particularly struck by it. The Government have issued 270,000 work permits to people from outside the EEA, but at the same time they have issued nearly 900,000 national insurance numbers—that is a difference of more than 600,000. Before I give my thoughts on what the meaning of that may be, perhaps the hon. Gentleman would like to give us his.

Paul Flynn: I am one of the many Members who wished to come here today to draw attention to the Government's very creditable record on dealing with pensioners. Is it not clear from the hon. Gentleman's remarks that he is denying us that opportunity in order to pursue a nasty, vindictive witch hunt against the Minister?

Chris Grayling: I look forward to debating pensioner poverty with the hon. Gentleman at the earliest opportunity, as we have every intention of holding that debate. However, I think he will agree that these issues have a direct correlation with levels of worklessness and child poverty, and when we, as the House of Commons, discover that the Government are failing as they now clearly are, it is right and proper that we should bring Ministers to this House to hold them to account as quickly as we possibly can.

Stewart Jackson: My hon. Friend may share my concern that the Government's sheer incompetence in their handling of immigration means that in housing, for instance, we have a situation whereby the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Wright), wrote to tell me:
	"Information is not available centrally on the local impact of migration on household growth."—[ Official Report, 25 October 2007; Vol. 465, c. 516W.]
	He informed me, however, that one third of projected new housing would be allocated for new immigration. Is that not a disastrous situation that leads to further problems of community cohesion and delivery of public services?

Chris Grayling: My hon. Friend is exactly right. The reason for holding this debate is that the fact that the system is out of control has direct, human consequences as regards levels of deprivation and the serious challenges faced by many British families in many communities around the country.

John Penrose: Surely this shows the Government's complete incompetence in trying to pursue their stated policy objective of British jobs for British workers. If they do not even know how many people are coming here from outside the EU and how they will control their access to work, that makes it impossible for them to pursue one of the central aims that the Prime Minister has repeated in this House on many occasions.

Chris Grayling: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will set out in more detail why this completely undermines many aspects of the Government's current strategy.
	Let me return to the gap of 600,000 between the number of work permits issued and the number of national insurance numbers issued—

Peter Hain: Could the hon. Gentleman give the House his precise understanding of the difference between a work permit and a national insurance number?

Chris Grayling: The Government explained that at the time of the publication of their regulations. If we are to believe them, given that it is clearly not the case, a national insurance number can be obtained only by someone who has the right to work in the UK. Is the Secretary of State saying that that is no longer correct? The Government told us that that was their policy, although it is clearly not what is happening on the ground. My understanding of the difference, and I think the understanding of any employer, is that if somebody turns up for employment with a national insurance number, that is taken as a stamp of approval from the Government—the right to work in the United Kingdom. If the Secretary of State wants to tell us otherwise, I should like to hear from him.

Peter Hain: I warn the hon. Gentleman gently, and in a friendly way, that he is digging himself into an even deeper hole. I asked him about his understanding of the difference between a work permit and a national insurance number, because he seems to think that they are the same thing.

Chris Grayling: I have never said that they are the same thing, but the Government's statements show that they regard the issuing of a national insurance number as linked directly to the right to work in the United Kingdom. They have clearly not managed the system properly given that, as we know as a matter of record from yesterday's revelations, national insurance numbers are being handed out to a large number of people who do not have a right to work in the UK. That is the point. Nearly 1 million people have received national insurance numbers: the question is how many of them really have a right to be working in the UK. We know that some of them do—for example, overseas students or dependants of people who have permits to work here.
	Lest Members should have any doubts about this issue, let me give a couple of examples of why I sincerely believe that the 600,000 figure masks a significant number of people who should not be here. Over the past three years, the Government have issued 755 work permits to people from Ghana, for example, but over the same period they have issued more than 21,000 national insurance numbers to people from Ghana. Take Albania, with 110 work permits issued and more than 4,000 national insurance numbers issued. Try persuading me that all those numbers were issued under the normal— [ Interruption. ] The Minister for Borders and Immigration asks how many are students. Let me answer that question for him, because I have taken a look at the website of the Higher Education Statistics Agency, whose most recent figures show that a grand total of 235 Albanians are studying in the UK—hardly equivalent to 4,000.
	What do we know about the rest of those people? We have sought to do the right thing by probing the Government to find out who they really are. When my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere asked Ministers whether they could provide us with a breakdown of the gap between the number of work permits that they issue and the number of national insurance numbers that they hand out, their response—surprise, surprise—was that they did not have that information. So how do we take them seriously when they tell us that they know what is going on?
	Let me say what I think. I do not believe for a moment that all those national insurance numbers were issued to people who are legitimately in the United Kingdom. I have suspected for a while that the current system is simply out of control—that the Government are handing out national insurance numbers to people who have no right to be here, and that Ministers have told employers that the national insurance number system is something they can rely on when the opposite is the case.

Angela Watkinson: What chance does my hon. Friend think that the average employer has of knowing whether a national insurance number is legitimate, given the sophistication of the scams that illegal immigrants employ to obtain them and the apparent ease with which it is possible to do so? Are they not liable unwittingly to employ somebody who is not entitled to be here?

Chris Grayling: My hon. Friend is right. If the Government themselves cannot work out who is or is not entitled to a national insurance number, why should we expect the small business down the road to be able to do it?
	We now know for certain that this is precisely what is happening, not from the Government, who did not want to answer the questions—we have heard the Secretary of State's explanation, and I will leave hon. Members to reach a view on that—but from the Security Industry Authority, which had no problem in doing so. Yesterday, it confirmed publicly and openly, and Ministers finally accepted grudgingly, that every single one of the 6,000-plus illegal immigrants appointed to security posts had a national insurance number. After two months of not answering questions, in the end the truth had to be dragged out of them. Even as late as yesterday morning, the Department for Work and Pensions was still claiming that it did not know the answer, which, I have to say, stretches credibility. It was another attempt to hide bad news, this time for as long as possible. This comes at a time not just when the leadership of the Department is in a state of chaos but when the Government want more bad news like a hole in the head, and not surprisingly, on a serious issue we cannot get the information from them.
	With supreme irony, this revelation comes a week after the Government launched a campaign to warn employers that they face prosecution if they hire someone who does not have a right to work in the UK. The slogans are direct:
	"If you hire illegal migrant workers you're as illegal as they are"—
	an interesting message for the Secretary of State to contemplate. The campaign even points out that offenders can be sent to jail. The Government could not have been more direct about it.
	"Illegal working attracts illegal immigrants and undercuts British wages"—
	I quote the Minister for Borders and Immigration, who launched the campaign last week. He also said:
	"That's why the Government is determined to shut it down. The message is clear for employers—we will not tolerate illegal working."
	A week later, it turns out that the Secretary of State's Department is handing out national insurance numbers to illegal immigrants. How on earth are businesses and employers supposed to take the system seriously when it is quite clear that the Department has lost control of it? That is what has been so worrying about the revelations from the DWP in the past few months. Almost every month at Question Time, the Secretary of State parrots the Prime Minister's favourite slogan, "British jobs for British workers", even though it was pinched from the BNP, and even though it is illegal under European law. But how does he get British people into British jobs if he has lost control of the system for managing the flow of people into the UK coming from overseas to work?
	Let us be clear. The Secretary of State may only have been in his job since last summer, but the buck stops with him, and his grasp of the situation has been sketchy to say the least. In September, when he claimed that only 700,000 of the new jobs created since 1997 had gone to people from overseas, he was obviously wrong. It did not take rocket science to work that one out; one just has to go out for a walk in any of our cities to see the change that has happened. However, when I challenged him over that and told him that I thought he had got the numbers wrong, he was having absolutely none of it. Let me read to the House the letter I had from him. He emphatically stated:
	"The net increase in the number of migrant workers is therefore 700,000."
	He added:
	"In future, I am more than happy to provide you with such clarifications in private, to avoid the need to expose such confusion to public scrutiny."
	About three weeks after that, he had to make public appearances apologising for getting it wrong, so who is confused now?

Stewart Jackson: Is not the irony of this Government's appalling mismanagement of immigration the fact that the impact is felt most on low-skilled, low-wage people in a small number of communities in this constituency, including my own constituency of Peterborough? They are priced out of jobs by unfettered immigration, which causes enormous resentment and gives succour to the extremist parties on the right. I am sure that my hon. Friend will agree that the Government are responsible for that. The Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Stirling (Mrs. McGuire), might think it is an amusing thing to comment on, but it is not. It has ramifications for community relations throughout this country.

Chris Grayling: My hon. Friend is right because underlying the debate is a real human cost. Getting the system wrong has real consequences for people in communities up and down the country.
	If we could all see there was something wrong, why did the Secretary of State not see it? Let me ask him this question. When the security staff story first broke back in December, it was clear that there could be an issue with national insurance numbers. I have a copy of the application form here. It is quite clear, and it says that applicants are required to fill in all their details with a national insurance number. That is why we asked the questions, so why did he not answer? When did he first realise that something was amiss? Why was his Department still claiming that it did not know the answer as late as yesterday morning, when the Security Industry Authority was able to say what it knew? Why did it say that the answer was 100 per cent. when the Department was still trying to find out? Did he actually talk to it to find out what had happened, and what changes has he ordered to the national insurance number system since the matter occurred? Why has no statement been made to the House about what is clearly a problem in the Department?
	This is a matter of extreme importance, not for technical reasons related to our immigration system, but because of those nearly 5 million people stranded on out-of-work benefits. Not all of them can or will work again—those who cannot will rightly need the help of the state to support them—but very many of them can and should be working again. It makes no sense to have millions of people coming to work here from overseas, or to be so lax with people coming to Britain illegally, while so many people are sitting at home doing nothing.
	I am not sure the Secretary of State has fully grasped the seriousness of that issue either. When we met at the Dispatch Box last week, I pressed him about the level of child poverty in Britain. The academic evidence is clear-cut. Children brought up in workless households are more likely to fail at school, more likely to be workless themselves and more likely to end up in trouble in later life. Britain today has a higher proportion of children living in workless households than any other country in Europe, including the poorest new entrants to the EU such as Romania and Latvia. The Secretary of State does not seem to know that, because when I pressed him on the issue he said he thought we were "above the average" in Europe. I suggest that he goes back and looks at the figures again. He should cut through the Government's rhetoric, and take a look at the real picture in Britain today, where child poverty is rising again, where young people cycle on and off the new deal without finding sustainable jobs, and where, in some parts of our community, as many as one in three children are being brought up in workless households.

Mr. Speaker: Order. I say to the hon. Gentleman that what is before us is a very narrow motion, which he created. Therefore, he must keep to the terms of the motion. He is talking about the problems of families in this country, when the motion clearly expresses great concern about national insurance numbers being issued to illegal immigrants. According to his own distinction, the debate is very narrow indeed.

Chris Grayling: I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker, but the whole point is that this is the human cost of what the Government are doing. The more national insurance numbers we issue to people who are in this country not by right, the more we cause a knock-on problem for people in communities around the country who suffer from deprivation. Those people are looking for work and those jobs are not always there. There are many people in this country who we need to get back into work, and if the Government are sanctioning, through the inefficiency of the way they operate, a flow of people into this country who should not be here by giving national insurance numbers to them, they are effectively giving a stamp of authority to employers, saying, "Actually, it is okay to hire this guy because the Government's ticked his box. It must be okay for him to be here." That takes opportunities away from people in this country, and it has a huge human cost as a knock-on effect.

Mr. Speaker: The hon. Gentleman is perfectly in order to say that, but not in depth. He can touch on that point, but not in the detail he was going into previously.

Chris Grayling: I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker. The fact is that the Secretary of State is presiding over a Department that is focused on dealing with those issues, while at the same time it is giving national insurance numbers to illegal immigrants. That is not a record of which any Secretary of State of any Government should be proud.
	The truth is that the Government's record in managing the flow of people coming to work in Britain is lamentable. They do not know how many people are here. They do not know who is working. They do not know whether or not people have a right to work here, and they seem to be handing out national insurance numbers without question. Yet the Department overseeing all of this is run by a Secretary of State who, by his own admission, cannot add up. He said that he could not manage his own finances because of the pressures of work, but he still thought it was okay to take on the Labour deputy leader's job. He had lost control of the numbers not just in his campaign, but in his Department and all while he was trying to run not one, but two Departments of State. It all appears to be getting a bit much for him.
	We know that the system he is overseeing is in a state of chaos. We know that handing national insurance numbers to illegal immigrants will undermine efforts to tackle deprivation and get people back into work. Will the Secretary of State tell the House why he believes that he is still the right man to do the job?

Peter Hain: I beg to move, To leave out from 'House' to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
	"welcomes the new checks and controls the Government has introduced to reduce illegal working by foreign nationals, which include measures to prevent illegal immigrants being issued with national insurance numbers."
	I am very pleased indeed to be responding in this Opposition debate, and I am even more pleased having heard the speech of the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling). Up to five minutes to 4 yesterday, the Opposition wanted to debate pensioner poverty today. Now they do not, and I can understand why. They treated pensioners appallingly when they were in power and now they have nothing to say to them. For our part, we will continue to work, speak and act for justice for pensioners.
	I welcome this debate, not least because it gives me the opportunity to explain to the hon. Gentleman—and he clearly needs a proper education on this—what national insurance numbers are for and what they are not for, because he does not appear to understand. In fact, when he reads  Hansard tomorrow, or online later today, I think he will be embarrassed by what he has just said. The hon. Gentleman makes accusations about national insurance numbers and compares them with work permits, but they are not the same. Total national insurance numbers issued to non-EU nationals and the number of work permits issued cannot be compared, which he tries to do.
	National insurance numbers cover categories of people who are not required to have work permits but are eligible for national insurance numbers, such as overseas students, whom we welcome into our universities and who bring the fees that help to finance those universities, and the dependants of work permit holders—relatives who are given permission to come to the UK to join a family who already live here legally. There will always be more national insurance numbers than population, as, for example, national insurance numbers for deceased persons remain on the system to ensure that their surviving dependants can get benefits based on the deceased's national insurance contributions, including the widow's pension. That would also have been the case before 1997, when our Government came to power.

Chris Grayling: rose—

Peter Hain: Let me explain the facts that the hon. Gentleman clearly does not understand.
	European Union workers are entitled to count on national insurance contributions paid here for their pension in their country so their national insurance numbers and contribution records have to remain on UK systems after they have come and gone. That is part of the reason for the figures for national insurance numbers being greater than the hon. Gentleman might suppose.

Chris Grayling: I was making a point about national insurance numbers that were issued in the past three years. I assume that the Secretary of State has not been issuing national insurance numbers to dead people.

Peter Hain: I think the hon. Gentleman will be even more embarrassed about those comments. Of course we do not do that. The national insurance numbers of people who die remain on the system so that their dependants, including widows, can claim the benefits that flow from their contributions.

Andrew Robathan: As Secretary of State for work, will the right hon. Gentleman explain whether it is in order under employment law for a boss to call a member of his work force "incompetent"? How does it feel?

Peter Hain: That question does not merit an answer.
	Under Labour today, a national insurance number can never be proof of anyone's right to work, as the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell appears to believe and as he implied this afternoon. The previous Conservative Government believed that it should be and legislated to that effect. That is a crucial point. The Tories thought that a national insurance number should be a passport to work and legislated to that effect. I repeat that, under Labour today, the national insurance number on its own cannot be an automatic passport to a job. It is an administrative mechanism whereby we can track people's contributions to the national insurance system and record their entitlement to pensions and other benefits.
	Of course, when the Conservatives were in power, illegal immigration and working were not the global phenomena they are now. That was not because they had well thought out policies to keep them under control. The main reason was that, under their stewardship, the economy was going to hell in a handcart. No one, especially not the 3 million unemployed, associated Britain with work.

Stewart Jackson: I am listening to the Secretary of State with interest. It is clear from the quality of his speech that it was written by one of his phoney think tanks; we are not sure whether it exists or whether it is a hologram.
	The motion deals with immigration. If the Government are worried about immigration, why, two years ago, did they specifically opt out of sharing criminal records data with European Union countries? There are many cases throughout the country of national insurance numbers being given to people who have a criminal record in other EU countries. The Government do not seem to know about that and, what is more, do not seem to care.

Peter Hain: Again, I am not sure what the hon. Gentleman's comments have to do with the debate, but I am happy to answer his question. We are putting together systems and procedures to share information with Interpol and I shall tackle directly the subject of illegal immigration, its flow into illegal work and the question of national insurance. I give way.

Mr. Speaker: I call Douglas Carswell.

John Penrose: John Penrose, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker: Mr. Penrose, I apologise.

John Penrose: I keep saying that I am a lot prettier than my hon. Friend.
	If someone approaches an employer saying that they are a British citizen, that they have no proof of it but they have a national insurance number, how is that employer to be sure that the person has a right to work in the UK?

Peter Hain: Employers must make the requisite checks. I shall deal with the matter shortly because it is another false premise on which the Opposition motion has been framed.
	Unemployment was dire under the Conservatives, but it is no longer the case. This morning's figures again show that employment is at an all-time high, with nearly 3 million more people in work. Inactivity is historically low and a million people are off benefits. That is our Labour Government's record. It is a record of genuine achievement and competence, not Tory abject failure and incompetence.

David Davies: The Secretary of State says that 3 million more people are in work. He has plenty of figures at his fingertips; can he tell us how many of those 3 million people are British citizens?

Peter Hain: As I have been explaining, employment has gone up, including for British citizens. Wages have risen and prosperity has increased. There are more house owners and the economic picture is completely different from the one that we inherited from the Conservatives.

Angela Watkinson: The amendment announces measures to prevent illegal immigrants from being issued with national insurance numbers—a clear admission that it has been happening.  [Interruption.] Does the Secretary of State believe that he is introducing the measures unnecessarily? Their introduction implies that illegal immigrants have been issued with national insurance numbers. What additional measures will he introduce to retrieve or withdraw the national insurance numbers that have been issued to people who are not entitled to them?

Peter Hain: I am sorry to say to the hon. Lady that the level of ignorance and misunderstanding among Conservative Members on the matter is astonishing. Given that they chose to switch at the last moment from another topic to this one, I am amazed that they have not checked their facts. I shall describe shortly exactly what happens. I shall also describe the way in which, under the Government whom the hon. Lady supported and who were in power until 1997, the relevant procedures were inadequate and incompetent and could not nearly have dealt with the problems that we have faced with the global flows of millions of people on a scale never previously experienced in advanced European countries such as ours.

Chris Grayling: The Secretary of State accuses us of not checking our figures. However, his Department's figures show that both the proportion and the absolute number of British adults of working age in employment have fallen in the past two years.

Peter Hain: It is important to note when considering proportion that the population has been increased— [Interruption.] The facts are stark: 3 million unemployed under the Conservatives, but record employment under Labour, including record numbers of British citizens.
	I agree with Conservative Members that illegal working is an issue and I shall explain what we are doing about it. The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell should know that the Conservative Government in 1996 established a clear and unequivocal statutory duty on employers to check that new employees had the right to work. However, it is worth pausing and considering the key issue that, in doing so, they said that the possession of a national insurance number was sufficient proof of a right to work. The Tories said so and legislated to that effect. Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that that was a stupid thing for the Tories to do—it was both administratively impractical and left the door wide open to abuse. Yet as we all know, despite the requirements on employers, illegal working has remained a problem. Employers cannot abrogate their responsibilities for that, which is a point to which I shall return later in my speech.

Stewart Hosie: Will the Secretary of State give way?

Peter Hain: I want to make some progress, because I have been asked specific questions about changes and I want to answer them. Then I will give way.
	The situation has evolved over the years. It became apparent to us that some employers, either wilfully or inadvertently, were employing illegal workers, in part because those people had been issued with national insurance numbers. Some of those NINOs will have been issued to students who then overstayed, for example. In other cases, employers will have created their own reference numbers, to record tax and national insurance deductions, which are not recognised by either the Department for Work and Pensions or Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.
	We have therefore taken action, and I have been asked what we have done. In 2004, we changed the legislation inherited from the Conservatives to provide that a national insurance number alone is not enough to prove an entitlement to work, as it had been under the Conservatives. Since July 2006, all employment-related national insurance number applicants have to prove that they have the right to work in the United Kingdom, which is something that no previous Government—and certainly not the previous Tory Government—ever required. That has made a real impact.
	Since July 2006, more than 8,000 national insurance number applications have been turned down because they did not satisfy the right to work. Before someone can be given a national insurance number, they have to undergo an intensive face-to-face interview by a specialist member of Jobcentre Plus staff—I was asked about that by, I think, the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson), although it may have been one of her colleagues. Did that system exist when the Conservative party was in power? We all know the answer to that: no.
	The fact that we have tightened up the national insurance number system does not mean, however, that we have changed the fundamental responsibility of employers to check that their employees have the right to work. It is positively irresponsible for the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell to go on the airwaves and try to mislead employers and the public into thinking that national insurance numbers prove the right to work. That positively encourages rogue or ignorant employers to flout the law. What the Opposition are saying demonstrates not only that they do not understand the first thing about the system, but that they are far more interested in making political points than in doing anything about illegal working.
	The fact that some employers continue to ignore the law is the reason we are tightening up enforcement still further, by introducing increased fines from next month and, in extreme circumstances, prison for rogue employers, and why we are telling employers what their responsibilities are, through a major public awareness campaign. Will the hon. Gentleman put his and his party's weight behind those proposals? I give him the opportunity to answer that question.

Chris Grayling: We would be delighted to see any proposals that tightened up the system. The point that the Secretary of State appears to be missing, however, is that Ministers told the House in 2006:
	"Any individual applying for a NINO in connection with employment who does not have the right to work here legally will be refused one."—[ Official Report, House of Lords, 5 June 2006; Vol. 682, c. WS68.]
	That is clearly not happening. Why not?

Peter Hain: But it is happening. The hon. Gentleman is sticking to his pre-rehearsed script. He came to the House brandishing a speech that he thought would demolish everything before him, but it is based on a total misunderstanding of the facts and the realities.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about this, so let me remind the House what the Opposition's position was when the Security Industry Authority was established. Also, the motion that we are debating was inspired by problems that the SIA has been seeking to address and which are being addressed by the Home Secretary—

Bob Spink: Will the Secretary of State give way?

Peter Hain: I need to answer this point, and then I will come back to the hon. Gentleman.
	Let me remind the House what position the Opposition took when the Security Industry Authority was established. Their spokesman said:
	"The Opposition's approach to the Bill is that it should not place unnecessary, overly complex, bureaucratic or burdensome regulations on the legitimate sector of the industry...A large company can afford to employ people in compliance and administrative departments to ensure that regulations are satisfied. However, for people legitimately trying to run a small company...extra bureaucratic regulation is a huge problem."—[ Official Report, 28 March 2001; Vol. 365, c. 980.]
	The Conservatives will certainly get the gangmasters' vote with that attitude. Here they are, complaining about a lack of due attention and proper regulation, but when we were putting the necessary legislative changes in place, they spoke out against the tight controls that we introduced.

David Davies: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way. If the Security Industry Authority and the Home Office, which has been found to be employing illegal cleaners, cannot determine who can and cannot legitimately work in this country, how on earth does he expect a small shopkeeper, a restaurant keeper or a small business man to do so?

Peter Hain: That is exactly why we need compulsory identity cards for foreign nationals, but the hon. Gentleman is opposed to that policy. As I will explain in a moment—clearly he does not understand the situation either—compulsory identity cards will be a crucial weapon in stamping out the illegal working that, in supporting his party's motion, he professes to be concerned about.

James Paice: I want to return to the Secretary of State's reference to gangmasters. The Government introduced the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, yet there has been absolutely no diminution in the number of unlawfully operating gangmasters, who completely exploit usually illegal immigrants, who are housed disgracefully and paid a fraction of what they should be paid. That is because the Government have completely failed to provide the Gangmasters Licensing Authority with the powers and the resources to do the job that everybody in the House believes it should be doing.

Peter Hain: I just do not recognise that description of the situation at all.

John Penrose: I thank the Secretary of State for giving way a second time. He is talking about the importance of employers making the necessary checks. However, if an employer is faced with a legitimate British citizen who does not have a passport, how is that British citizen supposed to prove that he or she has a right to work in this country, and how does that affect the Secretary of State's point about national insurance numbers not necessarily being a guarantee of a right to work?

Peter Hain: There are all sorts of documents, including a passport, that employers will be able to inspect. Employers are advised by the Home Office on the correct documentary evidence that can establish the right-to-work status. A British national starting work can establish his or her right to work through a UK passport or a UK birth certificate. The Home Office guidance to employers is to be amended from 29 February. That will help to clarify any uncertainty. It is clear that the Government are taking action in every respect to tighten up the loose and unregulated system that we inherited.

Bob Spink: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way—he is being most generous. He said that employers still have a duty in law to check their employees' right to work. What would he expect prosecuting authorities to do in the event of an employer claiming that he was just too busy to make those checks?

Peter Hain: Again, I am not going to dignify that question with a response.

Several hon. Members: rose —

Peter Hain: I need to make some progress and then I will give way. The level of ignorance on the Opposition's far Back Benches, let alone on their Front Bench, is enormous.  [ Interruption. ] Indeed, they are back to front.
	Ensuring that someone whom one employs has a right to be in this country and has a right to work is not, in my view, asking too much. Neither is it "burdensome" or "unnecessary", as the Conservative party said it was when commenting on the legislation.
	To help to deal with illegal workers in future, we will further tighten the system by introducing identity cards for foreign nationals from the end of this year. I can confirm that, as the ID card system for foreign nationals comes in, anyone who applies for a national insurance number must produce their identity card, so we are introducing an extra clamp-down on illegal working. Will the Conservatives support this absolutely vital tool for achieving that objective?

Mark Pritchard: rose—

Peter Hain: I will give way to the hon. Gentleman. Perhaps he will tell us whether he will support compulsory identity cards for foreign nationals.

Mark Pritchard: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way. He will know that confidence in a Government, of whatever political colour, is very important indeed. In that regard, will he give the House a guarantee that there are no illegal workers at the Wales Office or the Department for Work and Pensions, so that people listening to the debate, or reading about it tomorrow, can have confidence in his Government?

Peter Hain: We have extremely strict procedures in the DWP on these matters. Many Conservatives are intervening on me, and I am happy to take all their interventions, but it is interesting that they are asking me questions on virtually anything except the issue that they have put down on the Order Paper. That is because they are embarrassed now that they have realised that it was based on an entirely false premise. When I—

Several hon. Members: rose —

Peter Hain: I am happy to take all and sundry— [ Interruption. ] Most of it is sundry. I am more than happy to take interventions, however.
	What is really embarrassing for the Conservatives about this debate is not just that they do not understand the issues, or the fact that the proposition on which they have sought to censure the Government is based on an entirely false premise, but that they will not support the proposals for the single weapon that would stem this problem at the outset—the introduction of compulsory identity cards for foreign nationals. That would enable regulations to be introduced that would be of enormous benefit to employers and everyone else.

Stewart Jackson: rose—

Greg Hands: rose—

James Paice: rose—

Peter Hain: Which one shall I take first? I give way to the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands).

Greg Hands: The Secretary of State seems to be blaming everyone else for this incompetence. He is blaming the Conservative Opposition and hard-pressed business people. May I take him back to the process of issuing national insurance numbers? His chief economist gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee two years ago, stating that Jobcentre Plus staff routinely issued national insurance numbers to all comers and that
	"it is not about ascertaining whether someone is legally in the country or has a right to work".
	Is that still the case?

Peter Hain: I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman has just traipsed into the House a little late, but he obviously has not heard what has been said. As this is an issue, however, perhaps I can explain the situation to him. The question that he has just asked is based on woeful ignorance. It is worth putting on the record the process for the allocation of national insurance numbers.
	To apply for a national insurance number, the applicant will need first to telephone the Jobcentre Plus national insurance allocation service helpline. When initial contact has been made, Jobcentre Plus will ensure that the applicant needs a national insurance number and does not already have one. After confirming that one is needed, a face-to-face interview will be arranged to establish evidence of identity. The customer will then receive a letter confirming their interview date and the types of documentation needed to support their application. The interviewing staff will complete a claim form and establish the applicant's identity by asking a series of questions relating to personal information.
	The interviewing officer will also establish that the applicant has the right to work in the UK by checking such evidence as Home Office documentation or a valid passport endorsed with the applicant's entry conditions. Any documents provided by the customer will be thoroughly checked using specialist document-checking equipment, and the completed application form and supporting documentation will be sent to the central control unit, where further checks are undertaken. The central control unit will conduct specialist tracing action to ensure that a national insurance number does not already exist, to check that the information supplied by the customer at the interview is correct, and to decide whether to allocate a national insurance number to the customer. Following the allocation of a number, documentation will be passed to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs to register the number.
	The checks that we make are extremely scrupulous and careful. It was absolutely necessary to introduce those extra checks and to change the law inherited from the Conservatives—the party that is seeking to attack us—to combat the abuses that would otherwise still be taking place. Yet the Conservatives will not support one of the single most important changes that we want to introduce—compulsory identity cards for foreign nationals. They will not give us the tool to do that.

Chris Grayling: Why did all those 6,600 illegal security staff applicants have national insurance numbers?

Peter Hain: Our staff are checking and working with the Home Office to establish precisely why that happened, and whether it was because employers were employing illegal workers or for some other reason that has not been identified. We are keeping oversight of the matter at ministerial level, and the Home Secretary has made it clear that she has agreed to report to the House when we are certain what happened.

James Paice: The Secretary of State keeps referring to the fact that the Opposition have misunderstood the situation. May I take him back to a very short statement—namely, the motion that we are debating today? It states that
	"this House expresses its very great concern that National Insurance numbers appear to have been issued to illegal immigrants."
	It says nothing about work or employment; this is simply a question of whether NINOs have been issued to illegal immigrants. Have the Government given NINOs to illegal immigrants in the two and a half years since the last general election—yes or no?

Peter Hain: It is interesting that that is not what the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell has been asking. It is not the burden of the Conservative Front Bench's argument. For the benefit of the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice) and for the whole House, perhaps I should explain the safeguards that are in place to ensure that a person has the right to reside and work in this country when they make an application for a national insurance number. I have already explained the procedure.
	When an appointment is booked at the nearest national insurance number hub, a customer is advised of the supporting documentation required to make an application. It is made clear that that includes a passport, a birth certificate, a registration certificate, Home Office documents, work permits and identity cards. After all the initial checks are made, the process is followed through in the way that I have described.
	The Conservatives appear to be suggesting that national insurance numbers are just being dished out to anybody who applies for one— [ Interruption. ] The hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson) is nodding in agreement.

Stewart Jackson: rose—

Peter Hain: I need to finish this point, then I will of course give way.
	I have just explained that the most stringent safeguards are in place, and they have been steadily tightened up as the global phenomenon of illegal immigration has increased right across Europe and elsewhere across the industrially advanced, prosperous world. We have tightened them up bit by bit, yet some of the measures that we have introduced have been opposed or criticised by the Conservatives.

Stewart Jackson: I thank the Secretary of State for his generosity in allowing interventions. By his own admission, either by omission or commission he has not been straight with the Labour party's national executive. Perhaps today he will be straight with the House. Why does he think that it was not the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats but the Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), who was prompted to say today:
	"There needs to be immediate action taken to stop the issuing of National Insurance numbers to those who are here illegally. It is not acceptable—especially as this was first seen to be a problem way back in 2006"?
	The Government have had two years to take this issue on board and deal with it properly, but they have clearly failed to do so.

Peter Hain: The hon. Gentleman has stumbled into the Chamber this afternoon clutching a rehearsed question, but I have already given the answer and I will explain other aspects in a few moments.
	I was talking about compulsory identity cards for foreign nationals and it is worth noting that foreign nationals, the subject of today's debate, feature in the Conservative motion. Yet if Conservative Members had the power to impose compulsory ID cards on foreign nationals, they would not do so because they are fanatically opposed to ID cards in any shape or form. Last week, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister twice asked the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), the leader of the Conservative party, whether he and his party would support the introduction of ID cards for foreign nationals—and he twice refused to agree to that. If the Opposition were serious about protecting Britain's borders and about the problem of illegal working, they would support ID cards, especially compulsory ones for foreign nationals. ID cards are supported by Sir John Stevens, the chairman of the Conservative leader's working group on border police, and by Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, chair of the Conservative leader's national and international security policy commission. I gladly give the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell the opportunity to say yes or no, right now, to compulsory ID cards for foreign nationals. I gladly give way to him on that point— [Interruption.] I note that he will not rise to say yes or no. I have been happy to take his interventions throughout the debate, but he will not get up to say yes or no to compulsory ID cards for foreign nationals.

Chris Grayling: rose—

Peter Hain: It looks as though he will now.

Chris Grayling: Why should the Opposition give yes or no answers to the Secretary of State when he will not give yes or no answers to my hon. Friends about the issue outlined in the motion? Will the right hon. Gentleman answer the question whether his Government have issued national insurance numbers to illegal immigrants over the last two and a half years? Yes or no?

Peter Hain: I have just explained to the hon. Gentleman that we have put in place the most stringent checks. If we find that a national insurance number has been issued to illegal workers, presumably through deception, we will see whether any further checks and measures are necessary, particularly in the security industry cases. In that case, we hope that, unlike in respect of ID cards for foreign nationals, the hon. Gentleman will support us.

Greg Hands: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Peter Hain: Not for a moment.
	It is no good the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell fulminating about illegal working when he wants to deprive Britain of an essential weapon—compulsory ID cards for foreign nationals—to defeat it.
	Lest we forget, I shall detail some of the other measures that the Opposition have felt unable to support on this matter: fines for hauliers who attempt to smuggle illegal immigrants into the country to work illegally; limits to benefits for asylum seekers; measures to refuse asylum to convicted criminals sentenced to two years' imprisonment—so much for the high and mighty condemnations of the Government that we have heard this afternoon.
	We are now in the middle of the biggest ever shake-up of Britain's border security, intended to tackle these problems: we are introducing a single border force to guard our ports and airports with police-like powers for front-line staff; we are checking fingerprints before we issue a visa for anywhere in the world; we are counting foreign nationals in and out of the country; and we are introducing compulsory watch-list checks for all travellers before they land in Britain and, for high-risk countries, before planes take off. We are also introducing a new points system like that in Australia so that business can bring in legal migrants to work here legally as we need them.
	Conservative Members express "very great concern" on the issue of illegal immigration. They are concerned if they think they can get a vote or two out of it, but not concerned enough to do anything about it or to back those such as the Government who will. As has been shown graphically this afternoon, this is a contrived debate. What Channel 4 news ran last night, the Opposition re-heat today, which is a fine example of what the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell does best—putting a crust on a soufflé.

Danny Alexander: It is a pleasure to follow the Secretary of State in such an important debate. It is rather disappointing, as the hon. Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn) noted earlier, that we do not have an opportunity to discuss pensioner poverty today—a hugely important issue on which so many hon. Members have much to say. I hope that the hon. Gentleman lives up to his commitment to find another opportunity to debate that important subject— [Interruption.] Today's subject is none the less important, but the exchanges so far have generated more heat than light, so I shall do my best to shed a little light on the issue.
	I appreciate that this may be a difficult day on which the Secretary of State has to respond to the Opposition motion, given that yesterday, in another context, the Prime Minister used the word "incompetence" to describe him. At the outset, the Prime Minister certainly made it clear that he intended to have a Government of all the talents; we did not expect that incompetence would be among them. Today's debate is certainly about incompetence, particularly historical incompetence, and the question remains whether such incompetence continues today. No one can doubt the extent of the serious problems that arose in the past, so we need to focus on the extent to which the Government's changes are delivering a more watertight system. Or is it the case that the revelations on Channel 4 News last night about security workers suggest that more needs to be done to surmount the problems highlighted?
	National insurance numbers are important because they have a number of uses, which the Secretary of State has enumerated in detail. They relate to work and are also important as part of the process of claiming benefits—an issue that I am surprised to note has not cropped up in the debate so far. The relationship between a national insurance number and a benefit claim needs to be addressed if we are to deal seriously with all the questions surrounding national insurance numbers.
	We have heard regular and repeated assurances—we heard them again today from the Secretary of State—that the problems identified with the national insurance number allocation process are being dealt with and that new processes are being introduced. I have seen information on a Department for Work and Pensions website, setting out precisely how the Government intend to apply the rules to ensure that all the relevant checks are made. As reported on Channel 4 News last night, however, 6,653 workers in the security industry, who were not allowed to work here as they were in the country illegally, none the less had national insurance numbers. The Secretary of State said that processes were now in place to ensure that workers who are here illegally cannot apply for or receive national insurance numbers. What checks have been made to find out what proportion of those in the security industry gained their national insurance numbers before July 2006, when the new system was brought in, and what proportion received them after that date? That answer is key to establishing whether the system has changed in reality.

Peter Hain: In respect of this inquiry, it is important to put on record—I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving me the opportunity to do so—that the Home Secretary advised the House on the basis of further checks that around 70 per cent. had the right to work in the UK. The Security Industry Authority has written to the vast majority of the remainder—more than 10,500 individuals—to advise them that it is minded to revoke their licences. Applicants were given until 11 January to respond and if the evidence is not forthcoming, licences will be revoked.
	I should add that, according to initial indications, many SIA applicants have quoted non-valid national insurance numbers. Those will not have been allocated by the DWP, and as such will not be recorded on DWP systems. Some of the numbers quoted may well be fictitious. For that reason too, I think that the premise on which the motion is based is entirely false.

Danny Alexander: The Secretary of State makes the important point that there is a range of possible ways in which national insurance numbers have been come by. They may have been invented or fictitious, but equally—and I note that the Secretary of State does not exclude this possibility—they may have been legitimately obtained by means of procedures that the Government have introduced. Given that, as the Secretary of State said, there are people who are here illegally—although I accept that, as he said, many are here legally—if those people had national insurance numbers that were obtained legitimately after July 2006 there is clearly a further problem in the system that needs to be addressed, and it is incumbent on the Secretary of State and his Department to make absolutely certain that that is done. In my opinion, that point could reasonably be made by Members in all parts of the House.
	The Secretary of State defended the system staunchly in his speech, and seemed to imply that the problems were no longer occurring. I think it important for the Department to conduct a proper investigation, based on the information that we now have about those workers in the security industry, to establish that that is indeed the case. I hope that the Secretary of State, or the Minister who replies to the debate, can assure us that such an investigation will be forthcoming. The Secretary of State said that some 8,000 applications had already been rejected on the grounds that the applicants were here illegally, and it is clear that some are indeed being rejected, but if—despite whatever changes have been proposed and made—the system for the allocation of national insurance numbers is still allowing numbers to be allocated to those who are here illegally, that needs to be investigated and further changes made if necessary. The Secretary of State does not appear to demur from that, but I will give way to him if he wishes.

Peter Hain: The hon. Gentleman is making his points in a reasoned way. He is keeping me accountable to the House, which is his job, and I respect him for that. However, I have explained the way in which we have tightened up the system. If anything that comes to light as a result of the latest episode suggests that we should introduce further checks, we will introduce them. The hon. Gentleman may wish to write to me suggesting possible measures.
	It is interesting to note that the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) has no idea what he would do. He has made no suggestions so far. We inherited a mess from the Conservative party, and if the hon. Gentleman has any suggestions of his own, I will of course consider them.

Danny Alexander: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for what he has said. I will make one specific suggestion now. I think that the Department needs to find out as soon as possible when the national insurance numbers in the 6,653 cases that have been highlighted were allocated, and tell the House what proportions received their numbers before and after July 2006. I realise that the task might be labour or IT-intensive, but it is important to shed light on whether the existing checks work or not. I hope that the Minister will feel able to commit the Government to doing that.
	Clearly, national insurance numbers have been issued in the past to people who were not entitled to receive them because of their immigration status—in other words, because they were not entitled to be in the United Kingdom. I confess that I do not know what this would involve, but what steps is the Department taking to ensure that those numbers are revoked and removed from the system and people cannot continue to use them in a way that, while not in itself sufficient to gain them employment, is nevertheless part of the process of gaining employment and might, in some cases, lull employers into a false confidence that those with whom they were dealing had a legitimate right to work or indeed to claim benefit, a subject to which I shall return shortly?
	This is, of course, not a new problem. In 2005, serious concerns were raised with Her Majesty's Treasury about people claiming tax credits who, although not in the country legitimately, had national insurance numbers. It seems that in 2000 it was decided, perhaps by officials, that it was too costly to check immigration status before issuing national insurance numbers. In the light of the latest events, the basis and purpose of that decision must be questioned.
	We must ask what are the implications of these events. As was pointed out by the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), they are linked to the problem of the number of foreign workers in the United Kingdom, and the ability to count people in and out. The Secretary of State announced back in November that the figures had been miscalculated, and that there were 1.1 million foreign workers in the UK rather than 700,000. The aspect of benefit fraud is also important. According to the DWP's website,
	"A National Insurance (NI) number is a personal number used: to record a person's NI contributions and credited contributions"
	and
	"because it is needed when claiming social security benefits".
	As was shown by a report published just before Christmas, nearly £2 billion is still being lost through fraud and error in the benefits system. That is a staggering figure with which I do not think anyone in the House can be satisfied. The most recent report showed that the amount of benefit being lost through both fraud and error had risen. While it is fair to say that in earlier years there was a steady decline in fraud, that seems to have stopped, and the amount of error is increasing. Given that national insurance numbers are necessary for the claiming of benefit—

David Taylor: They are not sufficient.

Danny Alexander: They are necessary for the claiming of benefit. I ask the Secretary of State and his colleagues also to investigate whether benefits have been claimed by people who were not entitled to them by reason of their immigration status, but who had national insurance numbers that had been inappropriately obtained. While the position should be viewed in a rational manner, it is important to investigate all the possible outcomes. There seems to be no doubt that at some stage, at least, people have been allocated national insurance numbers when they were not entitled to them.

David Taylor: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would not wish to mislead the House. Certainly national insurance numbers are necessary to the claiming of benefits, but they are not sufficient. A range of other checks, hurdles and barriers must be negotiated before entitlement is established. It is wrong to suggest that the two are synonymous.

Danny Alexander: I did not suggest that they were, as I think the record will make clear. Nevertheless, possession of a national insurance number is an essential starting point for a benefit claim. If the number has been obtained through the proper procedure, even if the person concerned is not entitled to it, that will allow the person to enter the process of claiming, although other information would have to be provided—in this instance, fraudulently—for the claim to be made. If, however, there is still a loophole, a problem, a mistake or incompetence in the system for the allocation of national insurance numbers, there are potential implications for the benefits system that need to be examined. I make no stronger claim than that, and I trust that the hon. Gentleman does not disagree with it.
	I could not agree with the tone of some of what the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell said about the nature of the problem of foreign workers. He was, of course, right to stress the need to ensure that the maximum number of British claimants of incapacity benefit, for instance, are given the skills and support that will enable them to return to work. That is a critical factor. It is also true that there must be strict rules governing which people from other countries are and are not entitled to work in this country. It would be wrong, however, for the tone of the debate to give the impression that the large number of workers in the United Kingdom who are from foreign countries, whether inside or outside the European Union, are not making a valuable and in some cases an essential contribution to our economy, our public services and so on.
	In my constituency, a large number of citizens from other European countries—I have discussed this with the Minister for Borders and Immigration—are making an essential contribution to the economy of the highlands and islands. That is not to say that people should be entitled to work if they are here illegally, but we need to conduct these debates in measured tones and to make it clear that those people are welcome in this country and are doing essential work. Of course, the pattern of migration will change over time, and it is critical that we ensure that as many people as possible get off benefit and into work. My point is perhaps more about tone than anything else.

Stewart Hosie: I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman might amplify that point. It is not merely that Inverness is booming and that excellent work is being done in Aviemore by a large number of mainly youngsters from eastern and central Europe. In the past three years, the populations of Dundee and Glasgow have risen after decades of decline, and the population of Scotland has increased, when it was forecast to decline over the long term. By and large, the general experience, both for those coming in and the people already living there, has been a happy one.

Danny Alexander: The hon. Gentleman is right. That is one of the reasons why both the previous Scottish Executive and the current Scottish Government continue to encourage inward migration to Scotland. Certain essential jobs would not be done were it not for foreign nationals. It is important, therefore, that we do not conflate the two categories of people: those who are here legally and those who are here illegally.

Chris Grayling: The hon. Gentleman is right, of course, that the tone needs to be appropriate and that we have to be clear in saying that many of the people who come to work here have every right to do so and have made a positive contribution. Undoubtedly there will be others who will do so in future. Does he agree, however, that we need proper and clear controls on the number of people we allow to come here, and that the challenge is exemplified by the city of Glasgow, where people have been coming in to work, but at the same time a substantial proportion of the adult population is not currently in work? That demonstrates the challenge that we face in ensuring that more people who are on benefits in this country have the opportunity to get back into work. Controls on the number of people working here are a part, but only a part, of the challenge that we face in trying to ensure that that happens.

Danny Alexander: I agree with much of what the hon. Gentleman said. I do not agree—but perhaps he was not making this point—that the two equate. We must work to get people off benefit and into work. He mentioned Glasgow and we could mention many other parts of the country, including my constituency. There are very good reasons to work extremely hard to address the issue. I have a lot of criticisms of the Government's approach to that matter, but they would probably be outwith the scope of the debate. Work is important not just for economic reasons but for reasons of the dignity and self-worth of the individuals themselves and the wider non-financial benefits of working. However, it is not a zero-sum gain. I am not saying that we need to get those on benefit into work, so that we can have fewer foreign workers; I think that we need both.

Stewart Jackson: The hon. Gentleman touches on an interesting point, which is that, away from the heat and light of this debate, there is quite a broad consensus on some of the consequences of the impact of unfettered immigration. Indeed, the Secretary of State's colleagues, the hon. Member for Dagenham (Jon Cruddas) and the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), and organisations such as the Scottish TUC have made the point about the impact of immigration in entrenching welfare dependency and exacerbating community tension. The hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Danny Alexander) is right to elucidate the consensus on that issue.

Danny Alexander: I am grateful for that intervention. Without wishing to venture too far outside the scope of the debate, I recognise some of what the hon. Gentleman said. What I do not recognise—I am thinking of the experience in my own part of the country—is the belief that the reason why many people are on benefit is that foreign workers are taking their jobs. There are lots of reasons why people are on benefit when they should not be, and they should be helped back into work. That is critical, but the two things are separate. For reasons of ensuring that this debate is conducted correctly, that separation needs to be made clear. Perhaps in his constituency, those are not separate considerations, in which case I would equally well accept that point from him.

Peter Hain: I intervene because the hon. Gentleman made a valuable point for the House, which is that migration adds a lot to the British economy. I am glad that the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell for once agrees on that point. In 2006, it contributed £6 billion to the British economy, accounting for about one sixth of the growth that year, so it is valuable. But it has to be legal.

Danny Alexander: I think that we have said enough on that point. The Secretary of State is right and the point about how the debate is conducted is important.
	It is worth pointing out that problems with the administration of national insurance numbers have also occurred under previous Governments. For example, if it were not for the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Northavon (Steve Webb), we might never have known about the failure of home responsibility protection. Because of problems in administration, no checks were made by the child benefit office to verify national insurance numbers until 1994. Women did not have to supply those details on the forms and it was not until May 2000 that it became compulsory for child benefit customers to do so. If it had not been for the work of my hon. Friend in highlighting that issue, many women would have been denied significant proportions of their pensions, because of the absence of proper checks on national insurance numbers. Such important matters must be got right, but at various times and at various levels, different Governments have made mistakes in the administration of the national insurance numbering system, and charges of incompetence could equally justifiably be levelled in both cases.
	This important issue must be addressed in a balanced manner. Above and beyond the short-term issue of the damage done to the Secretary of State's political credibility by recent revelations—it is very dear to his heart but it is none the less short term—this is a long-term issue that needs to be resolved, whether by him or by whoever follows him, should that eventuality arise. The Government need to do much more to ensure that there is confidence in the system. I have suggested that some investigations at least need to be carried out. For there to be confidence in the system, competence is required, including from the Secretary of State and his ministerial team.

Peter Hain: On the question of a competent series of controls, will the hon. Gentleman support compulsory identity cards for foreign nationals to help to deal with the problem?

Danny Alexander: No. As the Secretary of State will know, my party has supported the introduction of biometric visas for foreign nationals that would be included in passports and could be used in the checking process. When I looked at the DWP's website this morning and at the process for getting a national insurance number, one of the pieces of documentation that needs to be checked is the passport. A passport with a biometric visa included within it should, if that system is working properly—I see that the Minister for Borders and Immigration, who is responsible for these matters, is in his place—provide the means to check those things that the Secretary of State needs to be verified.
	The arguments against ID cards are much more wide ranging than the scope of the debate. To have a competent system, we need the appropriate checks to be in place, managed and administered correctly, and the appropriate leadership from the top. We need to be reassured about that during the debate.

Greg Hands: I am delighted to take part in the debate. I was staggered, although I should not necessarily have been particularly surprised, by the news that came out of the Channel 4 investigation and was further highlighted today. It seems to me that the Secretary of State is lucky to have two jobs. There are many people out there—illegal immigrants in this country—who seem to have many jobs, so I think that he should consider himself lucky, at least for the time being, while he ties those two down.
	We are talking about very large numbers of people here. We are talking about, in the past three years, almost 900,000 national insurance numbers being issued to non-EU nationals, but in the same period only 270,000 work permits have been issued. The big question before us is: what has happened to the other 600,000 people? As the Secretary of State rightly pointed out, some of them will be students, and others will be here entirely legitimately. Nevertheless, that is a huge number of people, and we need to explore who they are. In my experience, however, when this Government do anything that involves both counting people and the administration of migration it always leads to disaster, so having the two together in counting migrants may combine to make a double disaster.
	Immigration casework accounts for an enormous amount of my constituency case load. The Home Office, which, as we know, is pretty much incapable of counting anything, publishes each year a league table of the amount of immigration casework that Members of Parliament do, and I am regularly the top Conservative—I am ranked between sixth and eighth overall. All the Members at the top of that table are London MPs. I currently have between 700 and 800 immigration cases outstanding—cases where the person's status has still not been fully clarified or they are waiting to receive a document. That is a huge number of people in a constituency of 81,000. Some London MPs—particularly inner-London MPs—even have dedicated immigration case workers. The answering machine message of one of my neighbouring MPs says: "If you wish to speak to me on anything else then leave a message here, but if you wish to speak to me on immigration then you need to speak to the specific case worker."
	Our country faces a problem. There are many people who are legitimately in this country but who have been left for years waiting to have their status clarified, which cannot be in anybody's interest—either that of Britain as a whole in terms of our national economy, or certainly that of the applicant. On the other hand, there are hundreds of people who should not be here and have been told that they must make preparations to leave. I think of all the letters I have received that say, "Dear Mr. Hands, your constituent should make immediate preparations to leave the country, here is how we might be able to provide assistance and this is what he needs to do". Those letters might date from many months and sometimes years earlier, but nothing has happened as a result. That leaves me with no confidence in this Government's ability to police the people—and the nature of the people—coming in and out of the country.

Stewart Jackson: Does my hon. Friend share my concern that at the very time when there is such manifest Government incompetence in dealing with the wide range of people who are here illegally, we are removing to places such as Darfur and Zimbabwe people who should be given a chance to make a life in this country? They are being removed back to persecution and imprisonment, and possibly to death. That is the level of this Government's incompetence.

Greg Hands: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The disparity between the treatment of different types of migrants to this country is shocking, especially in relation to their country of origin.
	Absurd situations can arise. A constituent of mine who is a Bulgarian national was asked only months before Bulgarian accession to produce a set of 25 different documents, including her school records from back in Bulgaria—if only the tests on getting a national insurance number were as thorough. I am unsure what relevance her school records in Bulgaria might have to her immigration status, but that shows that the UK has a perverse inability to get the regulations right.
	Hammersmith and Fulham has a long tradition of welcoming migrants. It has an excellent record of harmonious community relations. It is home to a wide variety of cultures and religions; more than 60 languages are spoken by people from literally every continent. We have large communities from Africa, Pakistan and India, and many people from the nations of eastern Europe, notably Poland. I point all that out as background, as I will talk about some of the statistics on the sheer volume of people coming to my constituency and applying for a national insurance number and being given one.
	Two points arise from the controversy that we have before us today. The first is a total failure on the part of Government to give accurate figures on the number of people coming in and out of this country—the number of foreign nationals in employment, the number of foreign nationals who are here and legitimately in employment, and so forth. The second point is also important, and it is not just a pure political issue about migration: the knock-on effect on public service provision of failing to account properly for those numbers, particularly in terms of local authorities.
	The figures for new national insurance numbers are staggering, even before one considers whether they are legitimate.

Jim Devine: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Greg Hands: Of course.

Chris Ruane: A Devine intervention.

Jim Devine: I will try to live up to that description. If the Conservative party were in power, what the immigration figures be? What levels would the Conservatives allow? Conservative Members talk about the importance of assessing local service needs and other issues, but what would the limits on immigration be?

Greg Hands: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. It is difficult for us to put a number on that. The party says that we will put an annual cap on immigration, but it is difficult to know exactly what will be the economic circumstances at the time. There will be many variables in determining what that number should be, which is right. A lot will depend on the state of the economy come the next Conservative Government, perhaps as early as next year.
	My constituency has the fifth highest number of national insurance registrations by overseas nationals as a proportion of the population. As I have said, the figures are staggering. In 2006-07, 9,310 foreign nationals registered for national insurance numbers in the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. To put that in perspective, that amounts to 5.2 per cent. of the total population of the borough in just one year. That figure applies only to foreign nationals applying for a national insurance number, and only in a one-year period. If all those national insurance applications are legitimate, it suggests that the work force in Hammersmith and Fulham increased by between 10 and 15 per cent. in just one year. To put that in another perspective, that number—9,310 people—is larger than the number employed by the largest employer in my constituency, which is the BBC. It is also larger than the total number of people working for Hammersmith and Fulham council. Yet still the Government say that 9,310 foreign nationals registered for national insurance numbers.

David Taylor: Surely it is the case—this applies to the settled population as well—that people apply for national insurance numbers for a range of reasons, so such figures are far from restricted to or identical to the number of people who intend to work?

Greg Hands: The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point, but we cannot get away from the magnitude of those numbers: more than 9,000 is a huge number of people in a small London borough such as Hammersmith and Fulham. That is by no means the worst case; as I said; it is the fifth highest area in the UK for this phenomenon.
	There is a huge controversy about properly accounting for population, which this debate exemplifies. Local authorities in particular are either unable to provide services or have difficulty in doing so when they do not know how many people are living in their local authority area. I was interested to note that my council made a good submission to the Treasury Committee on the subject of accounting for population. One of the most popular means of accounting for local population is national insurance number registrations, which is one reason why we need to have absolute confidence in the legitimacy of the national insurance number allocation process.

Stewart Jackson: My hon. Friend is making a powerful and compelling argument, and we have worked together on bringing to the attention of Ministers this particularly difficult problem. The methodology that is currently used to allocate block grant from the Department for Communities and Local Government is based on fertility and mortality rates, for example, and it is completely skewed when account is taken of the significant increase of EU migrants in particular into the UK. Let me bring to my hon. Friend's attention the comments of Karen Dunnell, the national statistician, in May 2006, which still stand:
	"There is now broad agreement that available estimates of migrant numbers are inadequate for managing the economy, policies and services."
	What has changed?

Greg Hands: My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and he and I have taken part in Westminster Hall debates on this matter. The projection of migration numbers in my constituency is currently based, if I am not mistaken, on a trend from between 2001 and 2003. That is all very well, but if the trend line of migration or type of trend alter fundamentally—as they would have done, for example, following the accession on 1 May 2004 of eight new EU countries—that will have a severe impact on population estimates for a borough and its provision of public services. This is what my local council had to say in its submission to the Treasury Committee:
	"The important role that population data plays for local authorities does not appear to be reflected within the current procedures for producing population estimates. Sample sizes regarding migration levels are remarkably small for such critical information. Local authority funding can go up or down by several million pounds based on a handful of interviews."
	Let me just outline how getting one's data wrong can have a big impact. Again, national insurance registration plays an important part. Every council's local development framework is based on its population figures, as are councils' and partners' strategy documents. The statistics are also essential for determining school places. There is controversy in my constituency about surplus places in schools. One of the main arguments being used against any moves to reduce or change the number of schools is an increase in population, yet nobody can be in any way certain or even confident that their data on population increases, such as those brought out by national insurance numbers, can be justified. Not only the sheer numbers involved, but the age groups and also the origin of people coming into a borough, can have a big impact on how a primary care trust and a hospital trust caters for the health of its local population. This is very important stuff. It goes beyond the immediate issue of whether illegal immigrants should be given national insurance numbers to start with, because the results can have a big impact on local authority and other service provision.
	The population estimates are so wildly different partly because of national insurance numbers being given out. I shall quote one or two people in support of what I am saying, despite their not being from my party. I am delighted to see that we are joined by one of the hon. Members who represents Sir Robin Wales's borough of Newham, in east London, because he has said:
	"Our electoral register has gone up by 23,000 over the past few years yet they're saying"—
	they being the Government—
	"it's gone down...It's ludicrous. We've nothing against migration—it is great for the economy and great for Newham."

Lyn Brown: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that Sir Robin's point was about whether the Office for National Statistics had got its sums wrong, and not about the issue of national insurance numbers?

Greg Hands: I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. She is right to a certain extent, but one of the sets of statistics cited against the ONS statistical base, sometimes with good reason, is national insurance registrations. The people involved will not necessarily be picked up by the ONS, which has more or less admitted that its population calculation techniques are wrong or at least flawed. One of the alternative sources of such information is national insurance number registrations.
	Sir Robin went on to say:
	"We would be willing to pay for a census just to rectify these figures. It would cost us a lot of money, but these inaccurate figures are costing us even more."
	The ONS estimates that Slough has received 1,100 extra migrants since 2002—those are the official figures—but the local council estimates, partly from national insurance data, that at least 10,000 Polish people alone have arrived to work in the town since 2004. Migration figures released by the ONS in 2007 suggested that approximately 56,000 Poles entered the UK in 2005, but the Department for Work and Pensions issued figures suggesting that more than 170,000 Polish citizens applied for national insurance numbers in the same year.
	Such mistakes and inaccuracies in data can have a big impact on the funding and service provision of boroughs such as Hammersmith and Fulham. As I said, 9,310 foreign nationals were issued with national insurance numbers in the financial year 2006-07, which is 5.2 per cent. of the borough's population, yet the Government perversely say that our population is falling. If they took one look at their own national insurance data, they would ask who all these people are. They say that these people are not living in Hammersmith and Fulham, but they have all succeeded in getting national insurance numbers. Somebody urgently needs to do a study.

Caroline Flint: Does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge and understand that the fact that someone has had a national insurance number issued to them does not necessarily mean that they will remain in that particular area for ever? Many of those who come to work in the UK from EU countries come for a period and then return to their country of origin. It is thus wrong just to examine national insurance numbers as the basis for population figures, but I agree with the point he has made. That is why, through the migration impacts forum, we are looking much more closely at the impact on local authorities, the communities that they serve and local services of population changes and how static or fluid populations are.

Greg Hands: The Minister makes a similar point to that made by the hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Devine). Of course those are other factors, and there are other reasons why people apply for and are given a national insurance number. I am talking about magnitude. As I said, nobody can be precise or even close on population figures. We can only examine the magnitudes involved. Of course people are coming here and then leaving. I can tell the Minister that Hammersmith and Fulham has a population turnover of between 20 and 25 per cent. per annum, so we are well used to such turnover. The local council tells us that it should be funded to help people who are here for a short time—the fact that people are here for less than one year does not mean that they are not accessing public services.

Stewart Jackson: Does my hon. Friend share my incredulity at the sheer brass neck of the Minister and the complacency shown? We are debating national insurance numbers because they are practically the only way in which we can gauge the level of migration and immigration in this country. Otherwise, we are really talking about a few people with clipboards at airports and ports. No one takes the worker registration scheme seriously; it is completely flawed, as is the accession monitoring report. The Minister mentions the migration impacts forum, but it took the Government three years to establish it. They did so because their own supporters in their own local authorities, diminishing as they are in number, told them that what they were doing was disastrous for community relations.

Greg Hands: My hon. Friend is right. He and I have been urging the Government to examine all these problems, as have a number of local authorities, controlled by different parties, from across the country. We still have not got this issue right. I am looking forward to the day when Britain can say with confidence that its population data, both nationally and locally, are accurate.

Caroline Flint: On the point raised by the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson), it is clear this afternoon that the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) and his colleagues do not support issuing identity cards to foreign nationals and have not supported our plans on biometric visas. Given the previous point made, they clearly do not support the measures that we are taking to count people in and out. I understand that the Conservative party is in favour of a cap. Can the hon. Gentleman say what that cap is?

Greg Hands: I was under the impression that interventions, even from Ministers, should somehow relate to the context and content of the speech that is being made, Madam Deputy Speaker. I do not believe that I have mentioned anything about identity cards, and they are not on the Order Paper, so I find the whole thing rather peculiar.
	I want to continue dealing with the impact that these poor quality data can have on a local authority. As a result of adjustments to estimates of international migration, the population in my borough is estimated at 8,500 people fewer than the previous estimate for 2005—the same year in which the 9,310 foreign nationals registered for national insurance numbers. As a result, there has been a net loss to the borough of a huge amount of money in the calculation of local authority support grants and so on.
	The solutions for local authorities must lie in proper and robust population data, including, if not especially, on national insurance registration and on gateway authority funding for local authorities that are facing a big influx of migrants, whether legal or illegal. I want to make a few points on that particular controversy. I think that the Secretary of State was saying that that process is now very stringent when someone applies for a national insurance number, and, if I am not mistaken, he read out a series of hurdles that someone now has to jump over to get their number. I can only assume that the system has changed radically since his chief economist gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee in 2005, when he said that applicants are essentially issued with a national insurance number and that it was not about ascertaining whether someone is legally in the country or has the right to work, because they are given one anyway.
	Some 300,000 national insurance numbers are issued to foreign nationals annually. I was interested in a parliamentary answer given to my hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps). He asked how many fraudulent applications for national insurance numbers there had been in each of the past four years. The Minister responding said that the number of applications that had been refused in the previous year because there was a doubt about the identity of the individual was only 1,020. So 300,000 national insurance numbers were granted to foreign nationals and only 1,020 were refused across all categories. That seems to me a sign that the processes that the Secretary of State laid out may be all very well in theory, but there is doubt about whether they are happening in practice. If they were, the refusal rate would necessarily be much higher than 0.33 per cent.
	The Secretary of State seemed to suggest that business was at fault. Businesses clearly have a role in ensuring that the people who work for them have the legal entitlement to do so, but it cannot be primarily the duty of businesses to determine that. In 2006, the CBI said:
	"Employers face real difficulties in vetting potential employees because of the sophistication of scams by illegal immigrants seeking work. The apparent ease with which National Insurance numbers can be obtained makes an already-complex situation even more complicated."
	The Secretary of State read out a huge list of hurdles that people supposedly have to get over to get a national insurance number. I question the practicality of employers, especially small employers, being able to vet all that documentation.
	My final point is the incredible delay by the DWP in checking the situation. I understand that the Secretary of State has been otherwise involved on several other fronts in recent months, but surely he cannot have failed to notice that there has been an ongoing controversy in Parliament and in the media about foreign nationals working illegally in the UK. I have been given a chronology of all of the events since 12 July 2007, when the Home Secretary first saw a paper on the subject of illegal foreign nationals working in the Security Industry Authority. The chronology includes 18 different events, and bizarrely only the 18th—the publication by Channel 4 of its investigation last night—implies that the DWP at any point checked the facts of the case. I find that staggering, considering that the issue related to illegal foreign nationals.
	Let us contrast the situation in the UK with that in the US. Many of my constituents have worked at one point or another in the US and they know of the elaborate and laborious process that it uses to allocate social security numbers.

James Clappison: My hon. Friend makes an excellent point about delays and the lack of co-ordination between the Home Office and the DWP, which are jointly responsible. However, he was a little too kind to the Home Secretary when he referred to July. In her statement of 13 November 2007, she said that Ministers were informed in April 2007 by the Border and Immigration Agency that something was going wrong. There has been delay all along the line between both Departments.

Greg Hands: It really is a staggering fact that nine months have passed, and it was only when Channel 4 went on air last night that the DWP seemed to be taking the issue seriously. The Secretary of State has already been called incompetent, admittedly in a different context, but that length of time does not give anybody any confidence.
	As I was saying, any British subject who has worked in the US will have complaints about the lengths to which the system goes to check applicants for social security numbers, although most people realise that that is actually in everybody's best interests. It can take months and the tests are strictly enforced, because the US knows that social security numbers are a gateway to its entire benefit and pensions system. That system works in almost the same way as our system, and I hope that the DWP will agree to examine how the US social security number system works. The DWP would learn a great deal and would be able to do something to prevent a similar fiasco from ever happening again.

David Davies: A couple of months ago I was shopping for a rucksack in Victoria when I heard the gentleman in the shop picking up the phone and speaking in a strong Cockney accent. I was so surprised by that that I had the urge to say to him, as one might in a foreign country if one heard someone from one's own town, "My goodness me, are you from London? What on earth are you doing working in a shop in this place?" I really felt that, because it is so unusual in London or any other major city—even in some of the smaller towns—to meet in shops or restaurants someone who actually comes from the UK.  [ Interruption. ] The Minister may say "Disgusting", but it is a fact. She needs to get out of Westminster a bit more and go into shops if she does not think that that is the case.
	We now learn today that many of these people are not here legally or entitled to work at all. The Government do not seem to be in the least bit worried about that. They seem to have swallowed their own propaganda and the view that having millions of people working in this country, many of whom are not legally entitled to do so, is somehow good for the economy. It is certainly good if one wants a cheaper meal in a nice restaurant, because it means that lower wages are probably paid to the staff who work there. The CBI has said that immigration has had a good impact in keeping wages down, especially for those at the lower end of the wage structure. However, it has been very bad for unemployment in this country. The Minister may say that only smallish numbers of people are unemployed—just under 1 million—but we all know that more than 2 million people are on various forms of sickness benefit. The Government say that many of those people are perfectly capable of working and are introducing all sorts of schemes to try to get them into work. It is therefore a little rich when we are discussing unemployment figures for the Government to try to pretend, when it suits them, that those people are far too ill to work.
	The impact on the environment is vast. Everyone coming into this country will need access to public transport. They want cars and houses. There is an impact on public services, a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) just made excellently. People who come here expect their children to be educated. They expect access to health care and legal aid. They want documents translated. Occasionally—I had better say that—they commit crimes, and they have to be investigated and cleared up.
	The Secretary of State has left his place—he presumably has other things on his mind today—but he said earlier that the Government had calculated that the net impact of widespread immigration had been an increase of £6 billion a year in the growth of the economy. The reality is that he cannot say what the benefit to the economy is because nobody in the Government has ever bothered to calculate the costs of immigration—the cost of providing the health care, education, tax credits and all the other things that are on offer to British citizens. Therefore, it is impossible for anyone to say that immigration has been a benefit to our economy.

Danny Alexander: I made a point in my speech about the tone of this debate, and I was pleased that the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), the Conservative Front-Bench spokesman on this issue, agreed with what I said. I have to say that, having listened to the tone of the remarks by the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies)—including his references to "them" and his implication that all immigration is a bad thing—he has lowered the tone of the debate substantially. Is he aware of the experience of Mr. Nigel Hastilow, who was at one stage a Conservative candidate in Birmingham, and does he expect that the tone of his remarks will lead him to suffer a similar consequence?

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I remind all hon. Members that temperate and moderate language should be the tone of this debate.

David Davies: I challenge anyone to tell me what exactly I have said that is intemperate. Pompous, sanctimonious language such as that used by the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Danny Alexander) is precisely the sort of thing that is playing into the hands—

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I have just advised hon. Members to use temperate and moderate language in the debate. Perhaps we can continue now.

David Davies: I would be the first to do so, Madam Deputy Speaker. I like to say things as I see them. I do not believe that anyone should be discriminated against or treated badly because they come from another country; I make that absolutely clear. However, Members of Parliament for all parties have a duty to begin to speak out for many of our constituents. They are concerned about what is happening around them and find that politicians are all too willing to slip into sanctimonious language such as that which we heard earlier from the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey rather than standing up for their rights and putting things in the way in which they want to hear them put. The extremist right-wing parties are garnering support in this country precisely because too few people are willing to do that. I regret that very much.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. Will the hon. Gentleman please relate his remarks to the motion before us for debate?

David Davies: When the Secretary of State was in his place, before he slipped off to do other things, he told us that the Government have put all sorts of hurdles in place to prevent people who should not have access to national insurance numbers from getting them. He listed those hurdles, and no doubt they will be very costly, too. However, he made the point early on that a national insurance number does not mean that one is entitled to work in this country and that employers therefore have a duty to undertake checks such as those that he is putting in place. He seems to think that employers should have another raft of checks to find out whether those with national insurance numbers are entitled to work. That is absolutely ridiculous.
	I have employed people in my life, and I assumed that if someone came along with a national insurance number, they were legitimately entitled to work. If we are being told that that is not the case, I have learned something new today. The Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform must agree that many employers would feel the same if someone turned up with a national insurance number—the assumption would be that they had the right to work. If the Secretary of State meant that employers have to put checks in place, as a member of the Select Committee on Home Affairs I have heard that if they decide to run checks merely on non-EU nationals they might become the subject of a discrimination lawsuit. Presumably, employers will have to put in place a raft of checks that apply equally to someone from outside the EU and to someone with a full British passport. Perhaps the Minister can explain that in a little more detail.

Caroline Flint: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that in 1996, the Conservative Government passed legislation to enshrine in the law the employers' obligation to establish the right to work of anyone whom they employed?

David Davies: That may well be the case, but presumably employers assumed that anybody who was given a national insurance number already had the right to work. If that is not the case, as an employer at the time I was not aware of it. I wonder how many employers were aware. How many are now?
	The Home Office has been found to have employed illegal immigrants as cleaners and the Security Industry Authority, which is ultimately answerable to the Home Office, has been doling out security permits left, right and centre to security guards, some of whom ended up guarding the Prime Minister's car. Given that all that is going on, how on earth does the Minister think that someone running a small business will be able to put in place the checks and balances to ensure that someone in possession of a national insurance number is legitimately entitled to work? What checks would an employer have to make to ensure that someone was entitled to work? If the employee has a national insurance number, what else does the employer have to do to establish whether they have the right to work? I look forward to being told the answer by the Minister.
	The Department has shown a complete lack of competence. I have asked it whether it runs checks on the national insurance numbers of people who have escaped from prison. Hundreds of people have escaped from prisons over the years, although escaped is probably the wrong word, as they have just walked out of open prisons. They are not all living in the woods like Australian outback men, but are probably back in their flats, claiming benefits. If the Minister checked whether the national insurance numbers of people who have escaped from prison were being used to claim benefits, she would probably be able to round them up tomorrow, but the Department will probably not be in the least bit interested. She will be unable to answer any questions on the subject; I have tried this approach before.
	The Department is paying benefits to thousands of people of working age who are not even living in this country. How on earth can we expect it to have any control over who gets a national insurance number? The Department is pushing the whole thing back on to businesses, so that it has an easy Aunt Sally to blame when the next scandal about the number of people working here illegally becomes public.
	I am married to someone who came to this country from outside the EU. I know full well how people take advantage of the system, because they openly tell me about it. They have a good laugh about it. If the Minister got out a little more, she would know about that, too. If my language is intemperate in this place, hon. Members should hear how intemperate it is outside when I think about how much money is lost in this country because the Government cannot get their act together.

Stewart Jackson: It is a sign of the political bankruptcy of the Government that they cannot even muster one Back Bencher to defend their record—their only Members in attendance are from the Treasury Bench or are Parliamentary Private Secretaries. The Government are arrogant and disdainful of the views of the people of this country as well as those of the people who are elected to represent them. This is a sign of the disintegration of the Government and the hubris that will come to its nemesis in June 2010 when they are thrown out of power.
	Immigration is the reason, more than any other, that the Government should fall, because of the sheer incompetence that they have shown in dealing with the matter over a great number of years. If the Government think that they can get away with the disdainful attitude that they have shown today by not fielding any Back Benchers to listen to or contribute to the debate, I promise every single Labour MP in a marginal seat that we will tell their electorate that they do not care about this vital issue of national insurance numbers and illegal immigration. We will share that with the electorate and repeat it, and we will let those MPs face the electorate properly and explain themselves at the coming general election. Of course, they have taken their lead from the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who believes that abiding by rules and the law that he and his party put in place in 2000 is only for the little people.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. That is not a subject for debate today.

Stewart Jackson: As ever, Madam Deputy Speaker, I am pleased to take your guidance and will be happy to observe it.

Martin Linton: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Stewart Jackson: If his intervention is on this subject, I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman—while he is still the hon. Member for Battersea.

Martin Linton: Since the hon. Gentleman is so keen that Government Back Benchers should take part in the debate, will he explain why, as he is concerned about illegal workers getting national insurance numbers, he cannot persuade the leader of his party to come clean about whether he supports identity cards for foreign nationals?

Stewart Jackson: This might, perhaps, pre-empt you, Madam Deputy Speaker, but perhaps the hon. Gentleman has had a reasonable lunch and has just ambled in for a little mild peroration for the benefit of the good burghers of Battersea, but the situation that we are debating has nothing to do with ID cards. He will have to ask the Whip for a better brief next time.
	This is the Government who gave us one-legged Romanian roofers, who cost the job—

Martin Linton: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Stewart Jackson: The hon. Gentleman has an engaging smile, so I shall give way.

Martin Linton: As I have not returned from a lunch but a constituency engagement, I want to point out to the hon. Gentleman that the best way to ensure the integrity of national insurance for foreign workers would be an ID card system. He knows that.

Stewart Jackson: There is no empirical or academic evidence to support that view. That is the rather limp line taken by the Government—although not by Labour Back Benchers, since none have bothered to turn up. As we are talking about clear, unambiguous answers to questions, at the start of the debate my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) asked whether the DWP had given national insurance numbers to illegal immigrants. I hope that the Minister will answer that question in her closing remarks, as the Secretary of State failed to do so. I ask again: have the Government presided over the distribution of NI numbers to illegal immigrants?
	The present Minister for Children, Young People and Families used to be the Minister responsible for immigration. She lost that job due to the debacle over one-legged Romanian roofers, but this Government have also failed to deport almost 1,000 foreign prisoners, while the Home Office has employed illegal immigrants to guard the Prime Minister's car. We should not be surprised by that, as the memo leaked from the DWP in 2006 made it clear that it was official Government policy not to make any inquiries about the nationality status of people seeking NI numbers. That policy was attacked by the Labour peer Lord Grabiner as long ago as 2000. He made it clear that he considered what was happening to be a scandal, but the Government turned a blind eye and continued to do nothing about the problem.
	We should not be surprised either by the dodgy figures used by the Government when they predicted that 15,000 people from the eight EU accession countries would come to the UK from May 2004. That estimate was out by a factor of about 50, as the reality is that some 700,000 people from those countries have come here. That has had a commensurate impact on community cohesion, housing and jobs for low-paid and low-skilled workers, who resent such unprecedented immigration.
	I stand here to defend and speak for the people who are being pushed out of jobs, as no one in the Government will do so. Those people do not want to be resentful of incomers from outside their communities, but they do resent them because they see what is happening as a result of the Government's obvious mismanagement of the economy.
	Earlier, I mentioned the problem of criminal records. That is important, because giving NI numbers—and therefore de facto citizenship and nationality—to people from the EU who have serious criminal records is something that we need to know about. Again, the Government have turned a blind eye to the matter.
	Immigration has had a massive impact on local economies. My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) said that the equivalent of 5 per cent. of the population in his borough had received NI numbers. That is a fantastically high figure, but the experience has been similar in my constituency, where more than 8,500 people were given NI numbers in the first two years after May 2004. I am not even talking about the whole of the Peterborough city council area, either. My hon. Friend the Member for West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara) represents nine of the city council wards, but the figures that I have quoted refer only to what has happened in the other 15 wards covered by my constituency.
	Because keeping track of NI numbers is practically the only way to measure migration from the other EU countries, we have not been able to make proper plans for primary health care, primary education, housing and all the other elements that contribute to community cohesion. At the same time, however, good and decent young men in my constituency—asylum seekers from Darfur—are being returned to their possible deaths in Khartoum because the legal processes that they were using to fight to stay in this country and make a contribution here have been exhausted. They are being forced to eat bread and soup, to sleep on other people's sofas and to rely on the good offices of the Red Cross—an organisation for whose work in the Peterborough area I should like to take this opportunity to express my huge gratitude.
	The Government's failure to control immigration properly has given sustenance to the wicked and pernicious drivel that we hear from the British National party. We have heard that drivel already in Barking and Dagenham, for example, and we are beginning to hear it in the west midlands, Yorkshire and Lancashire as well. Such talk always emerges when there is a Labour Government in power. It emerged between 1974 and 1979, and it may be emerging again. We do not want that to happen in our towns and cities, and we can prevent it only if we control immigration properly.
	The irony is that, in many respects, a consensus exists. The Prime Minister's party political rhetoric and point-scoring has led him to use slogans such as "British jobs for British workers". He knew when he said it that it was illegal and that it could not be put into practice, but when we get beyond all that it is evident that there is a consensus about immigration in this country.
	The Conservative manifesto of 2001 supported the points system used in Australia. We were demonised, of course, by people like the Minister and her colleagues, and branded as closet racists, xenophobes and all the rest of it. My party also proposed the establishment of a border agency, and again we were told that we were xenophobes who wanted to keep out everyone who did not look or sound like us. Such claims were absolute nonsense, because we always made it clear that our proposal was based on what the country needed, irrespective of immigrants' creed, colour, religion or cultural background.
	What has happened since the Conservative party made its proposal? The Government have adopted our policy and established the Border and Immigration Agency. I was privileged to serve on the Committee considering the UK Borders Bill and I have reservations about the agency's effectiveness, but the Prime Minister and Ministers in the Home Office have made their commitment to it clear. We now have a points-based immigration system that is based on a policy filched from the Conservative party election manifestos of 2001 and 2005. Despite what the Government say, therefore, it is clear that there is some meeting of minds on this subject.
	This has been an important debate. The Opposition are committed to debating the issues surrounding pensioner poverty, but we also believe that the news and figures appearing in the media over the past few days mean that we had a duty to bring the Secretary of State and other DWP Ministers to the House to hold them to account for their actions. We also wanted to make the right hon. Gentleman accountable for his plans for the Department's operational direction over the next few years—if he is still in place.
	People in some parts of our country feel a sense of alienation and believe that they cannot trust any politician. They feel anger and resentment towards people who do not look and sound like they do, and that is wrong. Most people are decent. Wherever they come from, people come here to make a better life for themselves, and who are we to second-guess that? That applies even to those coming from the EU countries. If people are likely to earn five times what they could get in Estonia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic, what is wrong with their sending some money back home to their families?
	It is not my place to argue about that, but we can plan our immigration system and the delivery of public services properly only if we know what the numbers are. For that, we need honesty and transparency, rather than obfuscation and duplicity. The Department could make a start by answering questions properly, and it should not respond by saying, "This information is not collected in this format", or "The information could be collected only at disproportionate cost."
	The Minister should work with us to defeat the extremists and to ensure that we have community cohesion in a civil society that we can be proud of, where everyone gets on well with each other. After all, the Conservative party is as opposed to the problems with Muslim extremism that have arisen in some parts of the country as she and the Government are, but working together requires a degree of honesty.
	I believe that the Minister must concede that the Government's management of immigration in the past few years has been lamentable. If she really thinks that things can change, she must honestly accept that the Government have given some NI numbers to illegal immigrants. If she is not willing to do that, she must give a full explanation of the eminent failure that we have seen over the past few years.
	I had hoped that more Labour Members would attend this debate, and I am sorry that they have not done so. This is a vital issue, and we will share with constituents around the country the results of the debate and the Government's disdain for the views expressed in this House. I hope that the Minister is able to show some humility and honesty when she winds up, as we need an immigration system that works. We need a system that will give this country a sound future and decent communities, in which people can work together irrespective of race, religion or country of origin.

John Penrose: I had not intended to speak in this debate, but I want to make a short contribution for the simple reason that I am deeply disappointed that so far no Labour Back Bencher at all has spoken. Sadly, that is an example of the way in which the Government treat the issue. They wish to look the other way and bury their heads in the sand on a particularly important and difficult issue that deserves much greater attention.

Martin Linton: By the sound of it, the hon. Gentleman is devoting his speech to the absence of Government Back Benchers. As he is so concerned about the issue, let me tell him that it seems facile for his party to hold a debate on national insurance numbers for illegal workers while opposing the one measure that will, as he must know, do the most to enable the Government to make it impossible for illegal workers to come here, namely the introduction of identity cards for foreign nationals. At Prime Minister's questions last week, the leader of the Conservative party was asked three times whether he supported ID cards for foreign nationals—a measure that is due to be introduced in November this year. There was no reply. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will do Government Back Benchers the favour of giving an answer now: does he support ID cards for foreign nationals?

John Penrose: I am glad to have the opportunity to respond. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman could have made a proper speech on the issue, instead of just intervening on me. I plan to address the subject, because as he will know, an employer faced with a job applicant who says, "I am a British citizen and I do not have a passport" does not have any way of checking whether the applicant has a right to work. I am sorry, but compulsory ID cards for foreign nationals is no solution to the problem, if the person concerned says that they are not a foreign national. That is yet another example to show that the Government's arguments on ID cards, both on the hon. Gentleman's point and more broadly, are deeply flawed.
	As for the history, the Government's approach to the issues over the past 10 years was ably summed up by my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson). Their usual stance is first to deny that there is any problem, and then to say that anyone who points out that there is a problem is in some way giving succour to racists. However, we all know that unless decent, reasonable, moderate people, such as all of us in the Chamber, are willing to debate this important issue in a decent, reasonable fashion, a vacuum is created, which is filled by terrible extremists from parties such as the British National party. The Labour party's next move is to say, "Oh dear, there is a problem, and we need to do something about it. We do not have much idea of what that should be, so we'll spend the next year or so rubbishing the Conservative party's plans, and then we'll put them into action." The Government have suddenly realised that there is a problem. The scales have fallen from their eyes, and they have swiped the suggestions in the Conservative party's 2001 and 2005 manifestos. They are busily trumpeting the fact that they plan to introduce the measures suggested in them.
	The problem is not just with immigration and nationality; as has been made clear in this debate, there is a problem with the administration of national insurance, too. The terrible shame of it is that there is no disagreement on principle. As was pointed out in contributions from hon. Members of my party, there is a fair amount of political consensus on how the issue needs to be handled. The Secretary of State said earlier that a modest and controlled level of immigration—the right kind of immigration—is, on balance, good for the country, if it is managed properly. I think that everyone present would agree. Huge contributions are made to the country by people who arrived here recently, and who are working their socks off to make a better life for themselves, their communities and their families. I hope that no one present would disagree with that, and it is right to make that point.
	There is no disagreement on principle, but there is a problem with competence. We have a problem with administrative ability, or the lack of it. I am afraid that the Government have a long and undistinguished track record of serial errors. I start with the immigration and asylum systems, which have been hugely overloaded in the past 10 years. Waiting lists are ballooning, and there is an inability to cope with people who overstay and with genuine applications. The system is bogged down, so people who are genuinely in need are having to wait months, and in many cases years, often with no hope of even a date on which their case will be considered and responded to. My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands), who has a huge amount of experience on the issue, gave good examples of the kinds of problems that the situation creates.
	As we have heard this afternoon, in addition to incompetence in the administration of nationality and immigration matters, there is incompetence in the administration of national insurance numbers. The Secretary of State was faced with the fact that roughly 900,000 people have been issued national insurance numbers, but fewer than 300,000 people have been issued with work permits. He was asked whether he could say, hand on heart, that the missing 600,000—the gap—was made up purely of people who have national insurance numbers but who are not eligible to work, such as students. I found it particularly disappointing and worrying that he ducked the question several times. He basically said, "We're looking into it." What worries me and, I am sure, everyone else who has listened to the debate is that after 10 or 11 years of a Labour Government, we should not be in such a situation—a situation in which the Government do not know the answer to such a simple, basic question.
	Of course it is true that the international situation has changed, that there is far more pressure as regards migration, and that there is far more globalisation than there was 10 years ago. The systems have therefore had to be tightened up, but the problem is that they have not been tightened up quickly enough. The Government have consistently not been on the ball. That is why the problems have arisen. The issue is not one of principle but of competence, and when it comes to competence, the Government are sadly and badly lacking.

James Clappison: I think we would all agree that this has been a good, important debate to which there were a number of good contributions—at least from Conservative Members. As my hon. Friends have pointed out, we have not had the opportunity to cast a critical eye over contributions from Labour Members. To be fair to the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Danny Alexander), who spoke for the Liberal Democrats, he made a number of important points and asked some legitimate questions—questions that we have already asked, and on concerns that we share. He also mentioned the tone of the debate. I agree it is important that we approach the issues in a measured way, using the proper tone, but there has to be debate about facts, evidence and policy, and talking about tone is not a substitute for that. However, those are perhaps matters for another day. Certainly, the points that the hon. Gentleman made today on national insurance numbers were apt.
	We have heard some excellent contributions from Conservative Members, who have shown the depth of their knowledge of both the subject and their constituencies. That is particularly true of my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands), who rightly drew attention to the huge number of people involved—896,000 people from outside the European Union have received national insurance numbers since 2004. He posed the question that naturally springs to mind: what has happened to the 600,000 of them who are not work permit holders? Have we accounted for them? I shall say more on that point later. His speech was particularly valuable in bringing the issue down to an individual and local level. He spoke with great knowledge and feeling about different elements of the issue and different people in his constituency.
	My hon. Friend spoke about the immense impact that the issue is having in his constituency. He said that 9,310 national insurance numbers have been issued to non-EU citizens in his constituency alone in one year. That is equivalent to 5.2 per cent. of the whole population of the borough. It inevitably follows that there must be important impacts on employment, services and infrastructure in his borough. He drew full attention to all those issues on behalf of his constituents and made some valuable points. He also mentioned a concern that is shared by a number of Conservative colleagues: the incredible delays in administration, which make all the problems so much worse.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies) also spoke about the scale of the problem. He made an important connection between it and welfare policies—a connection that we have been keen to make throughout the debate. He spoke from the position of somebody who has been a small employer, who serves in the security industry as a special constable, and who is a member of the Home Affairs Committee. He made an important contribution to the debate, examining the issue from those perspectives. We do not hear often enough in the House the authentic voice of small employers, and my hon. Friend certainly put their case today.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson) also made a valuable contribution. He reminded us of the many previous episodes of mismanagement on the part of the Government in respect of the immigration and asylum system and the work permit system. He recalled the work permit scrutiny fiasco which produced the resignation of one of the predecessors of the Minister for Borders and Immigration, the foreign prisoner scandal which in due course produced the resignation of a Home Secretary, and the failure to predict the numbers of legal migrants who would come from the A8 countries. Some of us can remember back to when the Government produced their original prediction of that. The figure produced was 13,000. Since then there has been controversy about the exact number of legal migrants, but the figure runs into hundreds of thousands. That is important because the national insurance numbers which are the subject of today's debate have been issued since 2004, when that huge and unprecedented influx of legal migrants began. The 896,000 national insurance numbers were issued over roughly the same period, since 2004, which gives us some indication of the huge pressures created. My hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough made that clear, drawing on experience in his constituency and speaking on behalf of his constituents and drawing attention to the real problems that the Government's policies are creating for his constituents.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) made some important points in a brief speech which showed fully his great knowledge of and competence in the subject, as a member of the Work and Pensions Committee. He spoke with impressive authority and knowledge of detail when he drew attention to the simple problem of competence which arises in this case.
	A number of questions remain, but I begin with a word of congratulation to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. He will not have received many congratulations lately, but I offer him mine on the fact that there is such immense satisfaction with his performance that hardly any of his fellow Labour Members of Parliament have bothered to come to the Chamber to listen to the debate and none at all has bothered to speak. It is an achievement for the right hon. Gentleman that there is such a unanimous sense of satisfaction with his performance.
	I begin with the straightforward question that was asked of the right hon. Gentleman in a written question back on 14 November last year—how many of the non-EU nationals without the right to work, who were described by the Home Secretary in her statement to the House on 13 November, have been issued with a national insurance number? I have not had a reply to the original question, and I am not sure whether there has been an answer to it yet in the debate. I am grateful to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions for his explanation of the delay in giving an answer. I understand from what he said that it is all to do with checking facts with the Border and Immigration Agency and the security industry. I thank him for that explanation.
	I would be grateful if the right hon. Gentleman could give me answers to the other questions that I asked the week before about national insurance numbers issued to UK and non-UK citizens over the relevant period. I will let him into a little secret, if I may. Those questions are the responsibility of his Department, and the Department is expected to answer questions asked of it. Nobody else can be responsible for the answers to those questions.
	We wait for the answer to how many of those 6,653 people have been issued with national insurance numbers. We have been given a detailed explanation by the Secretary of State of the new checks that were put in place by the Government as a result of the measures taken on 6 June, so I think we can take it as read that none of the 6,653 national insurance numbers was issued after the new system was put in place in June 2006. I look to the Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform to tell me if that is wrong and if any of them were issued after 6 June. We are still waiting for an answer to the question how many NI numbers were issued in the first place.
	It is not hard to see why the Government are so reluctant to impart that information. After all, Ministers have been quick to lecture others about their responsibilities in respect of national insurance numbers. We heard a number of lectures today about what employers should and should not do and what is expected of them. The Home Secretary told us on 13 November when the matter first came to light. She said:
	"Employers are expected to assure themselves that their employees have permission to work".
	Employers, especially the small employers mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth, are entitled to ask what duties extend to the Government in respect of the same case. Surely it puts a different complexion on events if we learn that the self-same employees who should have been checked by the employers had been issued with national insurance numbers by the Government.

David Davies: Does my hon. Friend join me in hoping that the Minister will clarify that and tell us exactly what an employer has to do to establish the legitimacy of somebody with a national insurance number?

James Clappison: That is a good point, which my hon. Friend makes from the perspective of small employers. It is easy for Ministers to lecture employers about what they should do. They should spend more time putting themselves in the position of small employers such as my hon. Friend, rather than scoffing at them.
	We know that the 6,653 people who were issued with national insurance numbers were employees in—of all industries—the security industry. Some of them were under the Government's nose or even, apparently, guarding the site where the Prime Minister's car was parked. I think that that is what the Home Secretary admitted when she told the House on 13 November:
	"One of the individuals was involved in guarding an MPS facility where modified cars would be taken for repair work."—[ Official Report, 13 November 2007; Vol. 467, c. 531-33.]
	I think that is ministerial code for the Prime Minister's car being guarded in the compound. By the standards of the present Government, that was an outstandingly transparent and candid answer.
	The questions do not end there. We need to know whether the case of the 6,653 individuals was unique. Was that degree of incompetence over illegality something that the Government reserved for the security industry, or have there been other cases of national insurance numbers being issued to individuals without legal migration status?

Stewart Jackson: I am listening to the strong case that my hon. Friend is making. He is a member of the Home Affairs Committee. We are told that there are many checks and balances to enable illegal immigrants to be weeded out, yet the Home Affairs Committee commented on page 113 of its report on immigration control:
	"It is not clear how individuals will prove to the DWP that they have the right to work in the UK, nor whether those who fail to prove it will be reported to the IND for investigation and possible enforcement action."
	Does my hon. Friend not think that that is a disgraceful situation after nine years of Labour government?

James Clappison: As a member of the Home Affairs Committee at the time, perhaps a little modesty on my part is called for. Ministers were quick to take credit for the changes made in June 2006, but they did not draw attention to the fact that the Home Affairs Committee held an inquiry into the matter, took evidence and shamed the Government into taking action. Even now, not all the recommendations have been implemented. However, I do not want to go into my career on the Home Affairs Committee too much, not least while the Minister is present. We are entitled to ask about whether the case was unique. It involved the security industry, which the Government were in charge of regulating—that could be an explanation for what happened.
	However, is there a wider problem of illegal working? We simply do not know, and I do not think that the Government know. We have not been able to establish from the Government the extent of the problem and we have not had proper explanations today. Are the Government saying that, apart from the 6,630, all the 896,000 national insurance numbers issued to workers from outside the EU are held perfectly legally? Is that the Government's case, or can they tell us how far the problem goes?
	We have always accepted that 270,000 of those people may be work permit holders. Whether it is desirable to issue such a large number of work permits to workers from outside the EU when so many workers are entering from within the EU, including from the new member states, is another matter—that debate is for another day. However, the 270,000 are here legally and, as has been said on both sides of the House, they are no doubt hard-working and law-abiding people. The problem is that the Secretary of State appears to have no idea about them either, because he has no idea about the scale of foreign employment, legal or illegal, in the United Kingdom.
	To answer a point made in some detail by the Secretary of State in his opening speech, I remind him of what he vouchsafed to the House last year. He was shaking his head in disagreement when my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) was taking him through this point, so I remind him of his own words from  Hansard. He said:
	"The truth is that we have been incredibly successful in the past 10 years in tackling the main problem of those who are in and around the job market, with 2.7 million extra jobs in the past 10 years, about 800,000 of which involve those who have come from outside the country to work in Britain and are contributing to our economy."—[ Official Report, 8 October 2007; Vol. 464, c. 3.]
	Three weeks later, he had to write a letter admitting that he had been wrong, that he had been less than incredibly successful, that his figure was wrong by 300,000 and that the true number of non-UK workers was 1.1 million. Furthermore, buried in the detailed note that he attached to his letter—the degree of burial would have done credit to the Prime Minister—was an admission that the major part of the increase in employment was due to an increase in foreign employment. The Secretary of State was thus less than incredibly successful, but it turns out that he may not even have been mildly incredibly successful. According to a briefing note from the Statistics Commission, helpfully prepared for the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field):
	"The actual proportion of the employment increase accounted for by foreigners/migrants ranges from just over 50 per cent. when looking at foreign nationals and the 16-plus age group to just over 80 per cent. when looking at country of birth and excluding workers who are over state pension age."
	Perhaps that puts a different complexion on things; I do not know.
	From the Secretary of State's point of view, I suppose that there is another way of looking at it. Even if the UK share of employment is towards the lower end of that range, given the Secretary of State's recent record when it comes to returns on spending, 20 per cent. would be an incredibly successful outcome. For the rest of us, it is clear that when it comes to illegal and legal non-UK employment, the Secretary of State does not know what is going on. He basks in the sunshine of life and spends his time in blissful ignorance of all that is going on around him. Apparently, those near him do not care to trouble him with what little they know about what is going on; even now, he is apparently unaware of the joint plan of his Department and the Home Office—they cooked it up between them, although neither will now admit it—to bypass several million higher-paid skilled workers in this country in favour of non-EU workers, through the relaxation of the resident labour market test.
	We know that the Secretary of State may have had other concerns and ambitions, but as far as British workers and taxpayers are concerned, he is the Secretary of State in charge of their interests. He is out of touch in representing them; he has no grasp of what is taking place all around this country—the legal or illegal employment of non-EU nationals. He is the out-of-touch Secretary of State who is failing the interests of British workers and British taxpayers.

Caroline Flint: If nothing else, this debate has exposed ignorance—that is not a sin—about the nature of national insurance numbers and what contribution they do, or, as in this case, do not make in respect of foreign nationals' proof of identity to work in this country. Interestingly, this week my hon. Friend the Minister for Borders and Immigration made important announcements about how this year we will continue to embed policies that have led to a reduction in illegals coming to this country and to a reduction in the something like two years that immigration and asylum cases used to take to be processed—now we are looking at less than six months. This week, my hon. Friend also outlined our measures on identity cards for foreign nationals, counting people in and out and introducing a points system. We welcome the insight and experience of other countries such as Australia, which have helped to shape our policies.

Nadine Dorries: Will the hon. Lady give way?

Caroline Flint: I shall give way to the hon. Lady in a moment.
	The Conservative party has used the tactic of dumping a debate on pensions late yesterday in favour of a debate that, as I hope to outline, has no substance in relation to the right to work. That only demonstrates that the Conservative party has shown once again that when it wants to score populist points, immigration is its subject of choice.

Nadine Dorries: rose—

Greg Hands: rose—

Caroline Flint: I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman, who has been here through the course of the afternoon.

Greg Hands: I am delighted that the Minister mentioned populist points, because she supports the "British jobs for British workers" policy. How does that stack up with plans, being considered at the moment, that all jobs earning more than £40,000 should be open to nationals of every country, with the abolition of the resident labour test?

Caroline Flint: I understand that the test will not be dropped. This country will continue, as and when appropriate, to welcome those with high skills to work here and share their experience and expertise.
	In relation to jobs, I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has given me the opportunity to share with the House some very important statistics that were released this morning. I spent some considerable time on regional radio throughout the country, sharing with the UK—I was pleased to include Radio Scotland—the latest labour market statistics, which demonstrate that we have had the highest quarterly growth in the number of people in work since 1997. In the past three months, 175,000 more people have found a job, and—importantly, because this is not just about the numbers who get into work but matching that with the numbers who are coming off benefits—the figures on people claming jobseeker's allowance, incapacity benefit and income support are all going down. I was also pleased to share with the nation independent figures from the Office for National Statistics showing that the numbers claiming unemployment benefit fell for the 15th consecutive month to just over 807,000—the lowest figure for more than 30 years, and a fall of some 812,000, or more than 50 per cent., since 1997. For many Members, that is a world away from the unemployment statistics that hit 3 million-plus on jobseeker's allowance alone. When those numbers went down, they went straight on to incapacity benefit, which trebled between 1975 and the mid-1990s.
	The figures demonstrate that more people are in work and that many of them have come off benefits. That has happened over the past 10 years, complemented by people coming from overseas. If we can get it right, that is good for this country—for the British people who live here and the businesses that need workers.

Several hon. Members: rose —

Caroline Flint: I give way to the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies), who has also been here throughout the debate.

David Davies: Does the hon. Lady accept that she is unable to tell us how many of the extra jobs that have been created are for foreign nationals, although it is almost certainly between 50 and 80 per cent.? Does she further accept that many of the British people who are out of work are classed as being on the sick because they claim to have bad backs and stress? Is it not the case that British people are on the sick and foreign nationals are coming in and taking the jobs?

Caroline Flint: The key point is that there are more jobs, more people in work, more people coming off benefits, and wages are up, and that is good. I listened to what the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) said about benefits. There are measures that can be taken to assist people with ill-health and disabilities into the work place. Many people on incapacity benefit with long-term health conditions and serious disabilities want to work—our task is to help them to get there, but also to work with employers to recognise that they have a continuing contribution to make to the workplace. The hon. Member for Monmouth shows, as he did in his speech, that his choice of words in such debates does not always set the right tone or have the right vocabulary.

Stewart Jackson: I am delighted to see the Minister for Borders and Immigration in his place, playing a cameo role in the Chamber away from his onerous duties as Minister for the West Midlands and Labour campaign supremo for Birmingham.
	The hon. Lady's Government have presided over a situation in which we have 5.4 million economically inactive people while we import people who are usually low-skilled and living in slum conditions earning less than the minimum wage. If that is the sort of society that she is proud to have after 11 years of a Labour Government, I suggest that her policies and priorities are completely awry.

Caroline Flint: All I can do is reiterate that jobs are up, wages are up and the numbers of people on out-of-work benefits are going down. That is a pretty good place to be and a record that I am very proud of.

Danny Alexander: I have listened with interest to the hon. Lady's remarks about the Government's record on unemployment and so on. Before Dr. Pangloss is confirmed in his role as her chief speechwriter, perhaps she could note that the employment rate, which is the most important measure, is still no higher than it was at the peak of the last economic cycle in 1990. That is not something to be complacent about. In relation to incapacity benefit, numbers have gone down, but by a very small amount—from 2.7 million to 2.6 million. The failure to do that more quickly is one of the greatest failures of this Government's welfare policy.

Caroline Flint: I certainly do not see more people in work and coming off benefits as a failure. I am totally with the hon. Gentleman in that nobody should be complacent. The job market is constantly changing and evolving, and we have to adjust to that. The skills and training that people need, not just today but down the road in 10 years' time, are changing too, and we must ensure that we are doing what we can as a Government to support employers and organisations that have a role to play.
	Importantly, we have to challenge individuals who, if they can work, should work, and we should encourage them to do so.

James Clappison: Will the Minister give way?

Caroline Flint: I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, but I would like to make some progress— [ Interruption. ] I think that I have until four o'clock. The main point of today's debate is to discuss the matter of national insurance numbers, and the allegation that we have given individuals a right to work when those have been issued—or not, as the case may be. I would like to clarify that in my speech.

James Clappison: In that case, will the Minister simply tell us whether national insurance numbers have been issued to illegal migrants? A yes or no answer will do at this point.

Caroline Flint: I will come to that point.  [ Laughter. ] No, seriously. I will come to that point, but I just want to preface it by explaining what a national insurance number is not. The national insurance number is a unique, personal reference number that exists to track tax, national insurance, social security benefits, tax credits and payments of student loans. It is not a proof of identity. I am holding a national insurance card in my hand, and on the back it says, "This is not proof of identity". It also says so on the front. In isolation, it does not provide proof of the right to work in the United Kingdom.
	On the allegation that numbers appear to have been issued to illegal immigrants caught up in the review and investigation into applications for a licence to work as security personnel, my answer is as follows. At present, and during the course of the review, we have worked closely with the Home Office on that issue. The Home Office is currently checking through each record, and those records will be compared with DWP records. However, the results are not yet ready. Initial indications, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State pointed out in his opening speech, are that many SIA applicants quoted temporary national insurance numbers. Those are not official numbers, and they serve no purpose other than to attribute an administrative reference number for employers to use for tax and national insurance contribution deduction purposes. Since April 2004, their use has been actively discouraged by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. They are not recorded on DWP benefit systems, and they cannot be used for benefit claim purposes. We do not recognise some of the numbers as legitimate national insurance numbers, which is why we have to check them all to see whether they have been issued.
	The reality is that in 1996, a Conservative Government introduced legislation to put a legal responsibility on employers to establish the right to work of anyone they employed. At that time, the Conservative Government made no changes at all to national insurance numbers, they made no reference to the fact that national insurance numbers should be used as proof— [ Interruption. ] It is all very well to say that it was years ago, but it is the system that operated then, and continued to do so until we tightened it from 2006, meaning that someone applying for a national insurance number had to prove that they had a right to work in this country.

Danny Alexander: I am pleased to hear that that exercise of comparing Home Office data with the DWP record will take place. Would the Minister confirm that in examining the DWP data, a clear distinction will be made between national insurance numbers awarded before July 2006 and afterwards, so that the point raised during the debate would be answered? If she can do so, it will shed further light on the answers to the questions that have been raised.

Caroline Flint: As soon as we have the information, we will check as far as we can the date on which they were validated.
	I have to say that when I heard the reports last night, the SIA said—and I paraphrase—that the numbers looked like national insurance numbers. We have to determine whether that is the case— [ Laughter. ] Hon. Members laugh, but an accusation has been made that may be found to be invalid. That is not the right way to conduct a debate.

James Clappison: Will the Minister give way?

Caroline Flint: No, I am not going to give way—[Hon. Members: "Give way!"] No, I am sorry. I am not going to give way because a lot of contributions have been made, some of which may relate to the point that the hon. Gentleman wants to make, and I want to respond to them.
	The hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) made a point about the failure to get accurate figures for foreign nationals entering and leaving the UK. From 2008, we will start counting foreign nationals in and out of the country and we will introduce checks for all travellers before they land in Britain, and before the plane takes off in the case of high-risk countries. We have established the migration impacts forum, which gives the Government independent advice on the impact of migration. That, too, is important.
	The hon. Gentleman also commented on the number of national insurance numbers allocated in Hammersmith in 2006-07. The figure is 9,310 and represents numbers in the borough at a specific time. It does not necessarily remain static—some people may have moved elsewhere, including outside the UK. The 2006 data for the UK estimated gross in-flows of 591,000 migrants set against gross out-flows of 400,000.
	The hon. Gentleman also said that only around 1,000 people were refused national insurance numbers. There are separate tests. First, approximately 1,000 refusals, as cited in the parliamentary question to which he referred, were due to suspect identity documentation. More than 360 prosecutions took place in 2006-07. A further 12,602 refusals between April 2006 and November 2007 were for failing the identity test. On top of that, in the context of proof of right to work, a further 8,643 applications have been refused since July 2006, when the much stronger checks were implemented. That shows that our system is not out of control. It works.

James Clappison: rose—

Caroline Flint: No, I shall not give way.
	The hon. Member for Monmouth used intemperate language. On his point about employers, I hope that no hon. Member would disagree that employers, whether small, medium-sized or large, have duties to ensure that the people whom they employ have the right to work. We are streamlining and simplifying the employment routes into the UK under the new points-based system. We have launched a major public awareness campaign, which includes press advertising and sending direct mail to approximately 400,000 businesses, to ensure that employers cannot escape their responsibilities but are supported to make decisions when recruiting in their workplace.

David Davies: rose—

Caroline Flint: I cannot give way; I have not got enough time.
	The Border and Immigration Agency runs a helpline, which provides advice and support for employers.

Stewart Hosie: Will the Minister give way?

Caroline Flint: I shall give way quickly to the hon. Gentleman because he has been present all afternoon.

Stewart Hosie: The Minister is being generous in giving way. If she finds that national insurance numbers had been wrongly issued since June 2006 and that individuals who were not entitled to them had faked, forged or stolen documentation that was sufficiently robust to get a national insurance number, does she concede that such documentation would also be sufficiently robust to con an employer? Does she therefore agree that any penalty that might normally be imposed on an employer in those circumstances should be examined and waived if necessary?

Caroline Flint: If any issues that are found through the investigation warrant further action, we will discuss the matter with our colleagues in the Home Office and in Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. However, it is important in such a debate that we are sure of the facts and that we leave it with a much clearer understanding that national insurance numbers are not a right to work. Conservatives' implication that they are is wrong and does not help anyone understand, including employers, who may get the idea, if they simply listen to Tory Front Benchers, that national insurance numbers constitute a right to work. They do not.

James Clappison: Will the Minister give way?

Caroline Flint: I am not giving way. I have Back-Bench speeches to respond to.
	The hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson) spoke about planning services. They are important, which is why we set up a forum to address the issue. I visited Peterborough jobcentre not so long ago and saw first hand the work that it does with employers and others to support people into work locally. I only hope that the hon. Gentleman will spend some time discussing with those staff and those partners the good work that they are doing to tackle any abuses in the system and, more importantly, to help the people living in Peterborough to find work.
	In many respects the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) made a thoughtful contribution. However, with his experience on the Work and Pensions Committee, I hope that he would recognise that it is important to have the facts, rather than spurious allegations, to make good public policy.
	The Secretary of State and I have outlined the practical steps that the Government are taking to drive down illegal immigration and illegal working. We will continue to take the necessary action, with or without the support of the Opposition. We will also continue to implement the policies that have seen continued growth in employment, with 175,000 more people in work in the past three months, swelling the total to a record 29.36 million. We will continue to implement the policies that have seen the numbers claiming unemployment benefit at their lowest level for 30 years. We will continue, too, to acknowledge the economic contribution of migration into this country. We are addressing the issues of employment, welfare, pensions, border security and the proper identification of those who should be in the country and those who should not. All that the Opposition offer are allegations based on false premises and distractions. To that end, I seek the House's support for the Government's amendment.

Question put, That the original words stand part of the Question:—
	 The House divided: Ayes 242, Noes 310.

Question accordingly negatived.
	 Question, That the proposed words be there added,  put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments), and agreed to.
	Mr. Deputy Speaker  forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House welcomes the new checks and controls the Government has introduced to reduce illegal working by foreign nationals, which include measures to prevent illegal immigrants being issued with National Insurance numbers.

Theresa May: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I wonder whether you can give me some guidance on how to ensure that Ministers place information in the Vote Office so that it is available to Members in a timely fashion. The report of the Senior Salaries Review Body on MPs' pay, pensions and allowances was made available in the Vote Office two minutes ago, although I understand that information about its content has been available to the news broadcasters throughout the day, and has been made plain on news broadcasts.
	The Leader of the House is always saying that information should be made available to the House before it is made available to the media. How can I ensure, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that Ministers put that into practice?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I think that the literal answer is "By constant reminder". Mr. Speaker has himself endorsed the view that documents of importance to the House should be released as soon as possible, before appearing in any other forum. I can only say that I hope the document's recent arrival does not act as too great a distraction from the debate on human trafficking, to which we now turn.
	I have to announce that Mr. Speaker has selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister, and that there will be an eight-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches.

Human Trafficking

[Relevant documents: Twenty-sixth Report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Session 2005-06, Human Trafficking, HC 1127-I, the Government's Response, Cm 6996, the Twenty-first Report from the Committee, Session 2006-07, Human Trafficking: Update, HC 1056, and the Fourth Report from the Committee, Session 2007-08, Government's Response to the Committee's Twenty-first Report of Session 2006-07.]

Damian Green: I beg to move,
	That this House believes that human trafficking is the modern equivalent of the slave trade, and, while welcoming the Government's commitment to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, regrets that this commitment has been delayed for more than a year since the Conservative Party first asked the Government to take this step, and will not come into effect during 2008; welcomes the forthcoming United Nations forum to fight human trafficking and urges the Government to take further immediate steps to help the victims of trafficking, including new measures to intercept traffickers and victims at our borders, better provision of refuge places, the use of telephone helplines, and a drive for better cooperation among national authorities within Europol and Eurojust, so that the United Kingdom can become one of the leading countries fighting human trafficking.
	It is good for a number of reasons that we are having this debate 48 hours after the Home Secretary made the significant announcement that in the next 12 months the United Kingdom would ratify the European convention on action against trafficking in human beings. The first is that it was a cause of some national shame that 12 other countries had ratified the convention and we had failed to do so. The second and most important is that it may mean that the Government will stop merely talking a good game on action against trafficking, and will actually live up to their rhetoric. The third is that it shows that parliamentary opposition can have some effect in shaming a Government into doing what they know they ought to do.
	It was in January 2007 that we first urged the Government to sign the convention and to take a number of other actions against the appalling trade in human beings. In March they signed the convention, and made some other efforts against trafficking which we welcomed. By January this year, we thought that the process had become alarmingly slow, so two weeks ago we returned to our call for action, this time for ratification of the convention, and last week we decided to hold this debate. Two days ago, the Home Secretary said what we wanted to hear and we welcomed it, as we do in the motion. Better late than never is the appropriate phrase to describe the Government's performance on the matter.

Denis MacShane: Before the hon. Gentleman goes too far down that road, may I ask whether he is aware of the article that I wrote in January 2006 calling for such action? It took a full year for the Opposition Front-Bench team to support my proposal, and the outcome was achieved thanks to the help of Back-Bench colleagues in his party, who raised the matter again and again at Question Time. He should stop being so smug, because it is Members behind him who did it, not his absent colleague the shadow Home Secretary.

Damian Green: Being accused of being smug by the right hon. Gentleman is one of the more arresting parliamentary events of the day. Nevertheless, I pay tribute to his work in this regard. I am glad that he has brought it to our attention.

Several hon. Members: rose —

Damian Green: I should warn the House that I shall not give way too many times because there is a time limit on Back-Bench speeches.

John Greenway: It is members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe who have taken the lead on this issue on a cross-party basis. My hon. Friend is right, and I congratulate him on securing the debate, but will he ensure that we concentrate not just on the trafficking of human beings for the sex trade, which is appalling, but on the trafficking of children and of people in boats from north Africa? Those boats have nothing else to do, because all the fish have been taken away. We should do something about stopping them in the first place.

Damian Green: I will come in a moment to the specific point about the interaction between the sex trade and the wider trafficking problem.

Andrew Dismore: Speaking in the same vein as that in which my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) made his intervention, may I remind the hon. Gentleman that the Joint Committee on Human Rights first recommended ratification in October 2006? I hope that he is not going to turn this debate into a party political bun fight, because so far we have worked very well across parties on the issue. I see the chairman of the all-party group on the trafficking of women and children, the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), is nodding vigorously. We have had extensive and full debates on the issue. We have reached a huge degree of consensus and I hope that the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) is not going to spoil that today.

Damian Green: A later part of my speech includes a tribute to the hon. Gentleman's work and that of the Joint Committee. I will bring it forward to this part, because that Committee has indeed done valuable work. In the absence of anyone else wishing to point out how much they are in favour of getting rid of human trafficking, which we all are, I think that we would all agree that this is the year for action. We need to see the British Government take a lead.
	In that regard, to return to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway), I hope that the debate on trafficking, which is a tough enough topic to deal with in itself, does not become absorbed into the wider debate about how to deal with prostitution. Not all prostitution involves trafficking, and not all trafficking involves prostitution. The debate about how to combat prostitution is important. I know that the Minister has been visiting Sweden to see how its policy is working. He will have heard views on both sides of the argument about the effects of criminalising all men who use prostitutes. Over the coming months, however, the debate, not least within Government, about the way forward on prostitution must not be allowed to delay further action on trafficking. Let us not delay action against one evil because Ministers cannot yet agree on how to tackle a related but different one.
	Sadly, it would be easy to fill this speech, and indeed the whole debate, with terrible, haunting stories of women and children who have been brutalised by people traffickers, duped, sold into slavery and repeatedly raped or violently exploited in other ways. As we all know, it is a disgusting scar on the modern world and it is getting bigger. Human trafficking is the fastest growing international crime. In terms of the money that it generates, it is up there with drugs and guns as the biggest international criminal activity. It is a global problem. According to the US State Department, up to 800,000 people are trafficked every year and trafficking generates about $9.5 billion in annual revenue, according to the FBI's calculations.
	The United Kingdom is sadly classified by the United Nations as a high-level destination. We are a desirable destination for people traffickers. A 2003 Home Office estimate is that the economic and social costs of trafficking in this country alone are about £1 billion, of which about £275 million constitutes the market for sexual exploitation—as it puts it. Inevitably, all such figures are fairly rough and ready.
	Many Members have rightly been exercised about the increasing number of women and girls being trafficked into this country, not only from eastern Europe, but from Africa and the far east. Again, the latest official figures are from 2003, when the Home Office thought that there were 4,000 victims of trafficking who had been brought to this country for prostitution. The most stark and horrifying statistic in this regard is that 10 years ago 15 per cent. of women working as prostitutes in this country were foreign, but that proportion has now completely reversed: it is 85 per cent. and only 15 per cent. are domestic. The Minister might have slightly more up-to-date figures, but those are the latest ones I have seen published. That is a terrible statistic.
	This issue is not only about prostitution; it is also about forced labour. We know that 60 per cent. of the victims of trafficking who have arrived here illegally are used in forced labour. A distinction is often made between people-smuggling and people-trafficking. Terrifyingly, it is a fact that many people who think they are in the former category end up in the latter category: they think they are being brought here because they want to get here illegally, but actually they are going to be exploited. Many of them pay £20,000 and more to agents to bring them here, and when they are here they are forced into debt bondage: they simply cannot earn enough money ever to pay off their debts, so they are free to be exploited by criminal gangs. That trade is every bit as terrible as the trade for prostitution.
	As well as acknowledging the good work of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, it is worth paying tribute to the various organisations that are involved in trying both directly to prevent the trade and to encourage our Government and Governments around the world to take effective action on it, notably the Stop the Traffik coalition, from which I imagine many Members of all parties who are attending this debate have received information. It is doing an extremely good job, and it has made the point that next month there will be a United Nations forum on this subject in Vienna and that that is an important international conference where the global action that is clearly required to crack down on this global problem will be brought together.
	Instead of going through some of the dreadful horror stories, it will be constructive if I set out what we want the Government to do in the coming months and ask the Minister to explain why some of it has not been done already. I shall start with the ratification itself. I asked a question on 5 December about what changes to legislation were needed. The Minister replied that
	"we have identified a need for limited amendments to legislation and procedures, including the mechanisms for the support of victims of trafficking. The detail of the legislative changes is still subject to discussion within government".—[ Official Report, 5 December 2007; Vol. 468, c. 1220-21W.]
	As he has the House's attention today, perhaps he will tell us whether there is any need for primary legislative changes, or are simply secondary legislative changes required? If primary legislation is needed, why has the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill been allowed to go through? It became a Christmas tree set of measures in itself, with important additions at the last moment. Why was it not used as a vehicle for bringing in the changes that are needed? That would certainly have been welcomed in all parts of the House.
	I am genuinely bemused that these discussions are still going on inside Government. The Government signed the convention last March; we are now in January. When they signed it, they must have known what steps they needed to take to ratify it. It is extraordinary that these discussions are still going on inside Government some 10 months later. Clearly and rightly the Government have no objections to it in principle. They might have been reluctant to sign it if they thought it would in any way weaken our immigration controls. I imagine that, like me, the Minister has come to the conclusion that signing it would not weaken our very important immigration controls, so I hope to receive some explanation.

John Austin: The hon. Gentleman has made the point that it is necessary to have the measures in place in order to ratify. He criticised the Government for not having ratified when 12 other states have done so. Is he confident that those states have the necessary mechanisms on their statute books to be able to implement the convention?

Damian Green: The hon. Gentleman and I can sensibly assume only that those countries' Governments know what they are doing and that they have done as he suggests. As he knows, once we hit the figure of 10, the convention came into force, and I hope that he shares my regret that the UK was not one of the 10 countries that allowed that to happen; it would have been better if we had been. I hope to hear from the Minister about why we are where we are on ratification.

Anthony Steen: Am I right in thinking that if we are not among the first 15 countries to ratify, we will have little or no influence on how the ratification takes place and on the steps whereby the member states that have ratified decide what to do? In such circumstances, we would have no influence on what will happen in the ratification process.

Damian Green: I should, of course, add my hon. Friend to the list of those to whom I pay tribute, because the all-party group on trafficking of women and children, which he chairs, has done important work on this matter. I hope that the Government take his warning well.
	As well as ratification, the Conservatives want to see action on policing, prosecutions and the protection of victims. One year on, the Government have set up what they call a border service, but it is not a border police force. Various specific police operations, such as Pentameter 1 and Pentameter 2, have taken place, but there has been underlying confusion about the overlapping role of the various police departments that deal with trafficking. Amid the plethora of Government targets for which the police must have regard, there has been an absence of one on this matter.
	On Monday, my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) asked
	"why human trafficking is not core police business".
	The Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing replied:
	"It is."—[ Official Report, 14 January 2007; Vol. 470, c. 640.]
	This depends on how one defines core police business, because police forces are in no way rewarded for any work they do in this field. We know that because the chief superintendent of Peterborough police, Mr. Phillipson, has said:
	"There are no Home Office targets for this kind of police work".
	He continued:
	"This is rape and sexual abuse, happening on a daily basis, but it is unreported crime. I won't achieve any reduction in crime statistics by closing brothels...But, quite frankly, I don't care. As far as I'm concerned this is what police work is about and I know that it's the right thing to do."
	I am inclined to believe the policeman on the front line more perhaps than the Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing—

Anthony Steen: I asked the question in the House about whether tackling human trafficking is core police business, and the Government answered that it is, but is my hon. Friend aware that there was no statement in the House saying that it was core business? The action plan said that it would become core business, but gave no indication of when that would happen, and nobody knew anything about it until the Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing said the day before yesterday that it was now core police business. The significance is that if tackling human trafficking is core business, the police get money for doing that, but if it is not core business, they do not get that money. There is quite a lot of confusion in police forces as to whether or not it is core business, and whether they are getting any money for it.

Damian Green: My hon. Friend is right, and that is why the situation causes a problem.
	The Conservatives believe that we should have a proper integrated border police force, which integrates the immigration and customs services with the police, and that such a force should have the necessary powers to stop, search, investigate and prosecute. Instead of having a succession of ad-hoc operations, this type of operation should be a permanent priority. There should also be specific measures on border controls that would address trafficking, including separate interviews at all airports of women and children travelling alone with an adult who is not a parent, guardian or husband. That is a practice implemented successfully by the US, and it will help to identify potential victims.
	We believe that better police measures could be taken, and we also believe that they would lead to more robust law enforcement and more prosecutions. The Government say that law enforcement in this area is a priority, but in the last year prosecutions have fallen by 40 per cent., so the facts before us suggest that that is not the reality. We need more focus on prosecutions to tackle both supply and demand.
	As a country, we could do better on protection. I imagine that everyone who participates in this debate knows about the good work of the POPPY project, but while that should be seen as an acceptable pilot, it is not the whole answer, not least because it is based entirely in London. We need to increase the number of places in safe houses and we need to do better for under-18s who are trafficked. For current legal reasons, anyone under 18 who has been trafficked has to remain in the care of the local authority social services and cannot be moved to the POPPY project or any similar service. The problem is that far too high a percentage of those in local authority care have simply disappeared, and it is believed that many have been repossessed by the traffickers.

Madeleine Moon: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that another aspect that we must pursue is passing on some of the expertise that people working in the POPPY project and others have developed in helping women and children who have been trafficked to deal with the trauma? In that way, when they returned to their home countries they would get the help and support that they needed. Many of those countries are the poorest in the world and may have less expertise in the matter, and it is therefore our responsibility to share it.

Damian Green: I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady. Expertise has been developed in this country, and the more we spread that expertise and best practice the better.

Vera Baird: As a non-London MP, I just wanted to mention that there are now service-level agreements between the POPPY project and organisations such as Women's Aid, which supply the same services outside London as POPPY supplies in London.

Damian Green: That is indeed welcome, but I am sure that the Solicitor-General would agree that we need that to happen more, because the problem is now a national problem. Even the idea that it is a big-city problem is now out of date, because it occurs in small towns and even villages.

Margaret Moran: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Damian Green: I am sorry, but I know that many hon. Members wish to speak. I can feel that waves of hostility will come from both behind and in front of me if I take up too much time, so I do not want to do so.
	One of the other specifics that I wish to recommend to Ministers is setting up a helpline for victims of trafficking. I am sure that the Minister will have considered that. The Stop the Traffik coalition has suggested the use of a common helpline number across Europe. People who are trafficked inevitably travel through many countries and may not even know which country they are in. If there were one emergency number—obviously it could be effective only if it routed to an in-country national service—across Europe, it could be most effective.
	Apart from the signing of the convention, we need better co-operation between Europol and Eurojust on this issue. The Government should also encourage British companies to do what they can. My hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale mentioned some of the problems of African countries, and the Minister will be aware of one particular problem with the confectionery industry. Côte d'Ivoire produces 40 per cent. of the world's cocoa crop and there is a lot of evidence of children as young as 12 being trafficked from even poorer African countries, such as Mali, into Côte d'Ivoire. The effective way to stop that is for the big international confectionery companies, many of which are based in this country or have significant operations here, to insist on proper standards throughout their supply chain. That would be the best approach, and while it is not direct Government action, I hope that Ministers will encourage it.
	The Opposition are pleased that the Home Secretary made her announcement on Monday. We will monitor the Government's progress on ratification. I have sought to set out a number of practical suggestions for action that the Government can take immediately that would help to reduce trafficking into this country and in other parts of the world. Obviously, there is complete unanimity that human trafficking is a disgusting crime and a growing problem. For once, I can stand at the Dispatch Box and say sincerely to Ministers working on the problem that I hope that they are effective and successful. My simple message to them is: please get on with it.

Vernon Coaker: I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question and to add instead thereof:
	"condemns the trafficking of human beings as one of the most vile crimes to threaten our society; welcomes the Government's commitment to make the necessary legislative and procedural changes required to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings before the end of 2008; believes that ratification is an important milestone in the Government's concerted strategy to protect the victims of trafficking and bring to justice those who exploit them; notes that the UK Action Plan on Trafficking, published in March 2007 on the same day as the UK signed the Convention, comprehensively pulls together the work already under way across Government to tackle trafficking and creates a platform for future work; praises the work of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, established in March 2006 as the central point of expertise and operational co-ordination in tackling human trafficking; supports the valuable work done as part of nationwide police-led anti-trafficking operations, including Pentameter 1 and 2; and notes the £4.5 million of government funding provided over the last five years for victim protection under the POPPY scheme, which supports adult women trafficked into the UK for sexual exploitation.".
	I compliment the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) on the vast majority of what he said and, apart from the first couple of sentences, the constructive way in which he engaged with the subject—I thank him for that. I also thank all hon. Members who are present for the debate, particularly the significant number of parliamentarians who have had a huge input in taking the agenda forward. I thank not only my ministerial colleagues, and some members of my party who are in the Chamber—my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), who is Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane), my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), the Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, and many others—but, in particular, I thank the hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway), who has taken a particular interest in labour exploitation, and the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), who has done a fantastic job with the all-party group on trafficking of women and children and through all his other work to take the agenda forward. Of course, I also thank hon. Members from the Liberal Democrat Benches.
	There will be differences between the parties about some of the things that I shall say and about some of the Government's policy decisions. However, we can and should be proud of the way in which we have tried to lead the debate as a Government and as a country. Regardless of the party politics, some hon. Members present today have been at conferences where representatives of other European countries have come to talk to us about how we are tackling the problem and to try to learn from us as we try to learn from them.
	As well as thanking Members of the House, I want to thank the stakeholders across the county: Amnesty International, ECPAT—or End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography And the Trafficking of children for sexual purposes—Stop the Traffik and all the other non-governmental and voluntary organisations. They, too, deserve a huge degree of credit for the way in which the debate has been taken forward.
	Trafficking is one of the vilest forms of crime and one of the vilest harms that threaten our society. It is unbelievable that 200 years after the abolition of slavery by the House of Commons, we are yet again debating slavery in 2008. Members from all parties have said that our Government should take the matter forward. That is what the people out there would not only expect of us but demand from us.

Shailesh Vara: The whole House agrees that it is right that the Government should take the matter forward. As that is the case, does the Minister agree that as trafficking will now be a core subject for the police the necessary funds will be made available? That is particularly important because those elements of organised crime involved in guns and drugs are increasingly moving into sex trafficking.

Vernon Coaker: I shall deal with some of that later in my speech. The then Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke), wrote to all chief constables to point out that whereas drugs were the first priority, the second was organised immigration crime, of which human trafficking was a significant part. That is important in trying to clarify some of the points made by the hon. Member for Totnes. The debate is difficult because the question is not only about money for police forces but about expertise, knowledge and intelligence. If we simply make money available without taking account of other factors, we will not get the results that we want. The operations Pentameter 1 and 2 were in part about developing that knowledge and expertise so that the police service can reduce the level of harm to which people are exposed, and free them from the slavery that we all oppose.

Pete Wishart: The Minister will know that we in Scotland have particular problems with human trafficking. The police say that the number of incidents seems to be rising more quickly in Scotland than in the rest of the UK, with the result that it now accounts for 13 per cent. of the total trade. Responsibility for the police is a devolved matter for the Scottish Government, but all the initiatives are UK-wide. Can he reassure me that he is working hand in glove with the Scottish Government to ensure that this pernicious trade is tackled effectively in Scotland?

Vernon Coaker: I can reassure the hon. Gentleman on that point. Home Office officials are in contact with their counterparts in Scotland, and I have spoken to Kenny McAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary, asking for a meeting at the earliest possible opportunity to discuss how we can take this whole agenda forward.

Madeleine Moon: Recently, I visited Albania as part of a delegation from this House. One thing that became clear was that the British police had worked in partnership with that country and given guidance and advice about dealing with drugs, guns and people trafficking. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need police and border forces in the countries of origin to work with us and to contribute the same level of expertise in the fight against those crimes?

Vernon Coaker: I do agree, and my hon. Friend's excellent question helps me respond to what the hon. Member for Ashford said about the importance of Europol, Eurojust and the cross-border work that we have to undertake. In a few weeks I hope to visit Romania, Bulgaria and Albania, where I will talk to police forces and Ministers about how we can work together to deal with what is a common problem. Unless we deal with it at an international level, in Europe and across the globe, we will find, for all our efforts, that it is difficult to make the progress that we want to make.

Several hon. Members: rose —

Vernon Coaker: I shall take a couple more interventions, and then I need to make progress.

Margaret Moran: Does my hon. Friend agree that it is very important that we look beyond Europe and the accession states? Last year I visited Ukraine, where I met representatives from both statutory and voluntary organisations. Even more than police forces, the latter are the key to tackling the problem of human trafficking. Does he agree that we need to work with the British Council and the voluntary organisations in those countries that, like Ukraine, are being used as the entry point for human trafficking in the EU?

Vernon Coaker: I agree absolutely with my hon. Friend. As I said earlier, there is a global dimension to a problem that affects countries all over the world. That is what makes tackling trafficking so difficult, but my hon. Friend makes a valuable point that deserves consideration.

Anthony Steen: I am grateful to the Minister for giving way to me, and may I first of all reciprocate his kind words and good wishes? It has always been a pleasure to work with him and his Department.
	When he goes to Albania, Bulgaria or other eastern European countries, the Minister might like to look at the problem that police forces have with Europol. That is the fact that every country uses different types of records. For instance, records can be based on fingerprints, DNA, psychological profiles or gun crime, but the categories vary from country to country. Europol is not effective as a result, because the necessary information is not being exchanged. Another problem is that most of the women recorded as being trafficked into Britain from Lithuania do not come from that country. The women involved come from other eastern European countries that do not belong to the EU, but the Lithuanian passport is used for them because that is the easiest to forge. Is he aware of that?

Vernon Coaker: I am aware of the issues that the hon. Gentleman raises, and we need to discuss how we can tackle them.

John Greenway: rose—

Ann Cryer: rose—

Vernon Coaker: I shall take two more interventions, but then I shall make progress with my speech as I want to leave enough time for as many contributions to the debate as possible. I give way first to the hon. Member for Ryedale.

John Greenway: I am most grateful to the Minister. This is a home affairs debate, but he was right to say that the problem demands international action and that that action should be focused on the EU's borders. It is interesting that Bulgaria and Romania, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) referred, both ratified the convention on trafficking some time ago, whereas I understand that Lithuania is not even a signatory to it. As a result of this debate, will he speak to his colleagues in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and ensure that they too are engaged in the fight against human trafficking?

Vernon Coaker: I hear what the hon. Gentleman says. We talk not only to our European colleagues but to colleagues outside the EU. Indeed, I shall be speaking at a United Nations conference in a few weeks' time. The problem throws up a range of issues, not least of which is the need to ensure joined-up government in this country. An inter-ministerial group has oversight of taking the agenda forward. I take his point.

Ann Cryer: Does my hon. Friend regard forced marriage as part of the problem? It is a form of trafficking, yet it is not regarded as a criminal offence, despite the fact that many girls are taken from this country to the Indian subcontinent and forced to consummate so-called marriages. It is a form of rape.

Vernon Coaker: To be honest, I do not know the whole answer to that question. If anybody is trafficked for any reason, it is obviously a crime, but I shall look into my hon. Friend's point. If I get some inspiration before the end of my speech, I shall come back to it.
	If the House will allow me, I shall make some further points. The Government are totally committed to eradicating the abhorrent crime of trafficking in all its forms. On Monday, the Home Secretary demonstrated that commitment by announcing the Government's intention to accelerate plans to ratify the Council of Europe convention against trafficking, and to review the Government's reservation to the UN convention on the rights of the child. I want to highlight that, because it is of huge significance to many organisations outside the House as well as to Members.
	We have worked hard and consulted widely since signing the Council of Europe convention. For example, we piloted a model of victim identification within Operation Pentameter 2, identified gaps in compliance and developed victim support models. There is much to do, but thanks to the progress that we have made, we now believe that we can make the necessary legislative and procedural changes to achieve ratification later this year. Ratification will be a significant milestone in the fight against this horrendous crime.
	To answer the hon. Member for Ashford, we need to make four or five pages of legislative changes if we are to ratify the convention. Many of them will involve secondary legislation. There are four or five issues to do with article 10 of the convention, four or five to do with article 14, and four or five to do with article 23, as well as others. I shall talk to him later and perhaps share some of that information with him. We are taking the ratification agenda forward, but many of the changes can be made through secondary legislation. I hope that if we need to proceed through primary legislation, he will help us to do so as quickly as possible.

Mike Hancock: One of the legislative changes being considered involves a measure to allow victims of trafficking who were brought here illegally and who help in prosecutions to stay here permanently. Is that being considered seriously?

Vernon Coaker: We are considering it.
	As I said, ratification will be a significant milestone in the fight against the horrendous crime of trafficking, but it is only one stage in the ongoing battle against human trafficking. The Government have launched a series of offensives on different fronts as part of our wider anti-trafficking strategy. On 23 March 2007, the same day that we signed the convention, we signed the UK action plan on tackling human trafficking, which set out our national strategy and pulled together all the work under way across Government to combat the trafficking of adults and children domestically and internationally.
	The measure covers four key areas: enforcement, prevention, victim support and child trafficking. It also applies to trafficking for forced labour as well as other forms of human trafficking. The Government's commitment to enforcement is exemplified by the introduction of anti-trafficking laws that have resulted in a number of successful prosecutions. For example, since the commencement of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 on 1 May 2004, there have been 70 convictions for trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. However, those convictions do not represent the full extent of prosecution of traffickers, who are often charged with other serious offences, including rape, false imprisonment and serious assault.
	In April 2006 we launched the Serious Organised Crime Agency, one of whose top priorities is the fight against human trafficking. To complement that work, we established in October 2006 the UK Human Trafficking Centre, which is tackling all forms of human trafficking as part of its remit. The police-led multi-agency centre was instrumental recently in the success of Operation Glover, which rescued 33 female victims aged between 12 and 15 who are believed to have been trafficked internally within the UK, and prosecuted and convicted a number of individuals. The case highlights the fact that human trafficking is not always about the movement of victims across international borders, but can involve the movement of UK nationals within the UK.
	In 2006 the first major national anti-trafficking operation took place. Operation Pentameter 1 was a great success, resulting in the rescue of 88 victims, 12 of whom were children. As a result, 232 arrests were made and 134 people were charged with a variety of offences. Following this operation the UK Human Trafficking Centre was set up.
	Pentameter 2, launched by the Home Secretary in October 2007, is another catalyst designed to assist police forces in developing their response in this area. Back in June 2005, the then Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, South, wrote to chief constables setting out what forces' priorities should be in relation to organised crime. Organised immigration crime, including human trafficking, was the second priority after drugs. It will interest all hon. Members to know that we are discussing performance indicators as part of the new performance assessment framework for policing and community safety from April 2008. One of those indicators could relate to human trafficking.
	Work is under way with the Association of Chief Police Officers to improve the capability of the police and their partners to deliver effective protective services. The UK Human Trafficking Centre will assist in the development of law enforcement expertise and operational co-ordination, which will improve the proactive policing response.
	Intelligence from Pentameter 2 is already furthering our understanding of the nature and scale of trafficking across the UK. I do not want to spark a huge debate as I am trying to complete my speech within the next few minutes, but it may interest hon. Members to know that as part of Pentameter 2—for operational reasons which I understand, the police are reluctant to give too much information to us at present—according to Chief Constable Tim Brain who has done a fantastic job in this area, along with Chief Constable Grahame Maxwell, over 542 premises have so far been visited, a large percentage of which were residential, demonstrating the hidden nature of the crime. That is a significant change from some of what was happening in Pentameter 1. The number of arrests has already exceeded the number under Pentameter 1.
	Following the conclusion of Pentameter 2, the UKHTC in conjunction with SOCA will produce an updated strategic assessment—the hon. Member for Ashford asked about this—of the scale of human trafficking of adults and children in the UK. That will help us to improve on our previous research which, as he pointed out, indicated that there were 4,000 victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation in the UK in 2003, and it will help us to respond more accurately to the reality rather than the perception of the crime, and ensure that the counter-measures that we put in place are targeted and effective.
	Ratifying the Council of Europe convention will build on existing arrangements to provide a framework for minimum standards of support for all victims of trafficking. We are already doing considerable work. We have worked in partnership with the POPPY project to support adult women trafficked into the UK for sexual exploitation since 2003. We know that trafficking can have a devastating impact on a victim, and it is not enough simply to provide accommodation. That is why our UK action plan includes a range of measures to help identify and support victims and to try to prevent re-victimisation, which is crucial.
	A comprehensive victim strategy has been developed for Pentameter 2, in consultation with a range of stakeholders to ensure a consistent end-to-end approach. The campaign also provides an opportunity to develop local measures on trafficking. This includes scoping suitable service providers for victim support. The POPPY project, and the TARA project in Scotland, have been working with the UK Human Trafficking Centre and others to develop the capacity and expertise of other providers during the campaign.
	Following last year's campaign, the Salvation Army and the Medaille Trust established projects for victims. This year, partnerships are in place with a number of women's aid projects that cover areas such as Birmingham, Bradford, Sheffield, Leeds, Kirklees, Keele, Huddersfield and Harrogate. Is that enough? No, it is not. Is it an improvement on where we were? Yes it is, and we will make considerable progress. I think that the hon. Member for Ashford would agree that we have made a start and a move forward and have a positive statement to make to the House.
	The Government have also directed efforts towards combating child trafficking, one of the most abhorrent crimes of all. We have worked with the NSPCC.

Peter Atkinson: rose—

Margaret Moran: rose—

Vernon Coaker: I shall give way first to the hon. Gentleman and then to my hon. Friend. Then I shall need to finish.

Peter Atkinson: Can the Minister report any progress in negotiations with the UK newspaper industry to persuade local papers in particular to stop taking advertisements for massage parlours and similar organisations, which encourage trafficking? That is something that we can deal with quickly in our own country.

Vernon Coaker: The hon. Gentleman will know that the Solicitor-General, the Leader of the House and the Minister for Equality met representatives of the Newspaper Society, the Advertising Association and others. We are trying to take that agenda forward and hope to say something on the issue in due course.

Margaret Moran: The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, or CEOP, estimates that about 50 per cent. of trafficking involves children. Will the Minister join me in congratulating the work of the university of Bedfordshire, which is working with the NSPCC on that issue? Is he aware that it has found that children who are trafficked into this country are likely to go missing within 72 hours of being taken into social services care? There are traditional trafficking routes, so we need much greater monitoring and support for children in particular.

Vernon Coaker: My hon. Friend has made a hugely important point. A number of children whom we believe have been trafficked come into the care of the state and then go missing. That is unacceptable for all of us, and it gives us a policy dilemma in respect of what we should do. The hon. Member for Ashford legitimately and fairly said that we needed more safe houses. The hon. Member for Totnes and others will know that safe houses are sometimes a magnet for the traffickers. What seems a really good idea can have an unintended consequence.
	We are considering what we can do about the safety of children—particularly trafficked children—who come into the care of the state. We have issued and updated guidance to local authorities. However, let me be clear: if there was one thing that I knew would definitely work, I would do it now—but there is not an easy policy solution.
	The point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) is hugely important and we are considering what we can do about it and trying to take that forward. We are asking for the views and advice of stakeholders such as the NSPCC and ECPAT.

Peter Bone: rose—

Vernon Coaker: This is the last question that I shall take.

Peter Bone: I am grateful to the Minister for giving way and I congratulate him on how much work he has done to enable the Government to move forward on this issue. However, when they are found as victims, children trafficked for sexual exploitation are treated worse than their adult equivalents. Will he consider the situation in Holland, where secure safe houses are provided?

Vernon Coaker: We will learn from anywhere that can provide appropriate examples of how to deal with the problem. However, an awful lot of work is going on with children; I do not necessarily accept the hon. Gentleman's argument that in this country such children are treated worse than the adults.
	We have worked with the NSPCC to develop an advice and information line for social care and other professionals, to help them identify and support trafficked children. The advice line went live in October last year and in December multi-agency guidance was published to provide comprehensive information for all front-line professionals on the identification of victims and the actions required.
	As well as that work on the four main strands of the action plan, we have continued to work with international partners in bilateral and multilateral projects to share expertise and improve information sharing in this area. In particular, we are jointly leading an initiative on human trafficking, under the auspices of the G6, with Poland. We are also committed to strengthening our approach to tackling the demand for prostitution, which can contribute to the demand for human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation. As Members know, last week I led a ministerial visit to Sweden to look in more detail at the implementation of the legislation that criminalises the purchase or attempted purchase of sexual services. The information that we gathered will contribute to a six-month review of what more we can do on this issue, which will consider legislative and non-legislative options and look at the range of experiences in other jurisdictions.
	I have covered some of the current areas of activity. I believe that we have made significant progress in the battle against human trafficking but, as I have explained, trafficking is multifaceted and needs to be fought on many fronts. The key to a successful response is effective collaboration and partnership working, and we have embraced that approach. Alongside an inter-ministerial group, we, the Government, have sought to involve stakeholders through our ministerial non-governmental organisation group, which next meets on 28 February, and through participatory meetings such as the international seminar on the Council of Europe convention that we hosted in December.
	In its report of 13 October 2006, the Joint Committee on Human Rights commented that it was encouraged by its belief that
	"the Government is also committed to achieving the best possible balance in its overall policy to combat trafficking, grounding that policy in human rights standards, and has an open mind about how this can best be achieved."
	There is still much more to do, but I assure the House that the Government's commitment and determination to combat this horrendous crime is absolute, and we will continue to fight against this form of modern-day slavery. There cannot be many more important priorities for a Government. It is simply unacceptable that 200 years after the House of Commons abolished slavery it once again falls to us to tackle those who would use other human beings as property to be profited from. We must not allow it, nor will we. I commend the amendment to the House.

Christopher Huhne: Liberal Democrats greatly welcome the debate and are pleased that the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) and his colleagues have secured it. I also pay tribute to the evident passion and conviction with which the Under-Secretary addressed the subject. There is clearly a substantial measure of agreement across the House on this issue.
	Human trafficking is a shocking and scandalous crime that is now estimated to be the third most lucrative activity for organised crime globally. It mainly involves the sex industry, but also agricultural work and, horrifyingly, trafficking of people who are used in the removal of organs. The trade begins in desperation in the developing world—Vietnam, China, Romania, central Asia—where the victims are often offered the vision of a better life and are then committed to pay back the cost of their travel. In effect, as the Under-Secretary pointed out, they are introduced into debt bondage. They are given only the most meagre amount of work to pay back the sums that they owe. They are isolated, lonely, afraid, unable to communicate because of their language, and unable even to assess their own predicament.
	Inevitably, there is enormous difficulty in terms of measurement—it is rather like the black economy—and we do not know how extensive the problem is. However, experts certainly believe that it is growing. The US Secretary of State's adviser, Dr. Laura Lederer, says that we are now on a par with the numbers enslaved in the 16th and 17th centuries. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime puts the figure slightly higher than the US estimates cited by the hon. Member for Ashford—it says that 1 million people a year are involved, and possibly $32 billion in revenue. This is very big business.
	We therefore very much welcome the Government's commitment to ratify the convention. According to the Council of Europe's website, 10 countries have ratified so far, so the convention will enter into force on 1 February this year. So far, however, I regret to say that the signatories are mainly poor countries. Although we will be the seventh European Union country to sign up and ratify, we will be only the third developed country to do so after Austria and Denmark. I very much hope that the Government will maintain the pressure on other EU member states to stop displacement; the Under-Secretary has already talked about the G6 group, including Poland. I also note that the European Union can, as a whole, ratify the convention. Given the Government's decision to do so and their interest in preventing activity in this country from being displaced elsewhere, and assuming and hoping that our measures will be effective, will Ministers commit to pressing the EU, as a bloc, to ratify the convention?
	The Government were clearly right, too, to criminalise trafficking in prostitution in 2003, but limited resources have been given to Operation Parameter, and perhaps there should be a clearer focus, internationally, on the big guys. Will the Minister tell us whether the Serious Organised Crime Agency has been effective, and what its role has been in pursuing this matter? There have been successful prosecutions, which is good news, but there are still big gaps. The gangmaster of the Morecambe bay cockle pickers was not prosecuted for trafficking, although he was quite rightly prosecuted for manslaughter. No successful prosecution has yet been brought for trafficking in forced labour.

Anthony Steen: I suggest to the hon. Gentleman that there is a distinction to be drawn between prosecution and conviction. According to an answer to a recent parliamentary question, only 30 traffickers of human beings for sexual purposes had actually been convicted. Everyone constantly talks about prosecution; I suggest that the hon. Gentleman ask the Minister about convictions.

Christopher Huhne: The hon. Gentleman makes a good point; the distinction between prosecution and conviction is crucial. The point that I was attempting to make was that there had been no successful convictions at all for trafficking in forced labour, and we must attempt to address that.
	I am also concerned about joined-up government. The police quite rightly treat trafficked sex workers as victims of crime, and as potential witnesses, while the immigration service is more likely to treat them as illegal entrants and potential deportees. How do Ministers intend to resolve the inherent conflicts in agencies' approach to this problem? There is another example of potential conflict. The 1998 rule giving visas to migrant domestic workers and allowing them the right to change employer was key. The employer had to moderate their behaviour to stop the potential loss of their employee—to prevent them from fleeing to another job. There was at least some incentive to moderate what would otherwise be autocratic and unacceptable behaviour. Indeed, the Minister's colleague Baroness Scotland noted on 26 March last year that the Government were
	"conscious that the change we brought in greatly benefited domestic workers in this situation."—[ Official Report, House of Lords, 26 March 2007; Vol. 690, c. 1436.]
	It seems to me that the changes limiting the ability of such visa applicants to work with only one employer are retrogressive.
	We particularly need a framework for dealing with children. Article 10 of the convention states:
	"As soon as an unaccompanied child is identified as a victim, each party"—
	signatory to the convention—
	"shall...provide for representation of the child by a legal guardian, organisation or authority which shall act in the best interests of the child."
	That is very much the point raised by the hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran). The reality is that the current care system is creaking when dealing with such problems; it simply is not adequate. Child exploitation is on the rise. The figures that came out of the study that was commissioned in part by the Home Office show that children in 183 of the 330 identified cases went missing from the establishments where they were in care. The majority were over 16, but clearly some may have been abducted by the people who trafficked them, as someone said earlier, and others may have been afraid and simply fled. We need to do much more work on that front if we are to be sure of providing adequate care for those children who have been so brutalised and traumatised by their experience.
	Perhaps we should examine the Dutch system, which is holistic. I take on board the Under-Secretary's comments about potential problems with, for example, houses, but we need to be sure that we are providing security. The hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) also made that point. Security, whether in care homes or provided in another way, is essential.
	We must take care when placing responsibilities on local authorities—a favourite game of central Government, not least the Home Office—that resources are made available to ensure that responsibilities can be exercised properly. I hope that the pattern for other Home Office schemes, such as extending police community support officers and the subsequent reduction in funding, will not be followed.
	It is welcome that the Government intend to ratify the convention. I am sure that Ministers realise that it is a beginning, not an end to trying to tackle the problem seriously. Since the Under-Secretary has clearly done the work on the necessary changes in primary legislation, as he informed the House earlier, I hope that he can make a commitment to introducing those changes through amendments in the Lords to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. It was regrettable that they could not be tabled in the Commons, where some of my hon. Friends made that very point, but it is not too late to make the changes, assuming that the legal work has been done.
	The hard graft of finding practical ways to alleviate the suffering and protect the victims of trafficking is only beginning. We are considering an abhorrent crime, which is a scar on any civilised society. We must—I trust from the tenor of today's debate that we will—do all we can to end it as soon as is practically possible.

Andrew Dismore: The Joint Committee on Human Rights, which I chair, has taken a keen interest in the subject. That is shown by the number of our reports that are tagged for today's debate. We have achieved a great deal of consensus not only in the Committee but across parties on the vital subject. We greatly value our informal and regular contact with the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker), and I freely acknowledge his personal commitment to pushing for progress in his Department and across Government. His efforts have borne considerable fruit, although, as always, much remains to be done.
	Since our first report in October 2006, considerable progress has been made through the UK Human Trafficking Centre, the Government's action plan and their signing the convention last March, the start of Pentameter 2 last autumn and, of course, the additional support for victims, especially of sex trafficking—an appalling crime, whereby women are conned, coerced or kidnapped to face repeated rape and extreme violence.
	However, evidence for the scale of the problem remains woefully inadequate. In our first report, we recommended that research should be undertaken and published. We reiterated that in our report last autumn. The most up-to-date figures for sex trafficking date back to 2003, and they were considered inaccurate then. They are now way out of date. A scoping study was supposed to be published last June, but we were told that an inter-departmental ministerial group was "monitoring progress" and that Pentameter 2 would "improve our understanding". However, so far we have little in the way of hard facts and I hope that my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General will say what can be done to improve the position when she replies to the debate.
	We have no official statistics for child victims, whether they are in domestic servitude or imported for benefit fraud, to work in cannabis factories or in the catering trade, or for sex or forced marriage, which was mentioned earlier. We have no statistics on labour trafficking. Without details about scale, we cannot properly judge the efficacy of any response.
	Much has been made of the Council of Europe convention. We first recommended that it be signed and ratified in October 2006. We have repeatedly pressed for a timetable for ratification. We therefore greatly welcome the timetable that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary announced earlier this week, and the fact that we will ratify by the end of the calendar year.
	However, the convention comes into force on 1 February, with the ratification of Cyprus. Given that we have not ratified, we cannot participate in the Committee of Parties, which is drawn from ratifying states and will make recommendations on the convention's implementation and appoint GRETA—the group of experts on action against trafficking, who are chosen from nationals of ratifying states. There will, therefore, be no UK membership of that group.
	The Government have been honest and correctly said that we should not ratify the convention until we can comply with it. However, that prompts the question: what remains to be done to come within the convention's terms? The real issue is not ratification per se, but ensuring that we do what the convention requires of us to combat this vile crime. The heart of the convention focuses on victims. The Committee's recommendation was that the protection of victims must be incorporated in our legislative framework, especially in immigration law. The Government say that they will consult widely on the issue and investigate all the options, but we do not think that any of that is necessary.
	It is clear what is needed in that respect. We suspect that the problem is to do with immigration and the unwillingness in certain circles to accept that the so-called pull factor argument is a myth. In that respect, I exonerate my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary, who was distinctly uncomfortable when he was put up to advocate it when giving evidence to us. Indeed, he looked extremely sheepish indeed. It beggars belief that a woman would volunteer to be transported across continents, enslaved in a brothel and subjected to repeated rape and deprivation of liberty, with the threat and actuality of extreme violence, on the off-chance that she will beat our tight immigration system.
	The immigration issue is, I suspect, the sticking point. The convention requires a recovery and reflection period of 30 days—we on the Committee consider that inadequate and recommend three months—but it is not clear whether co-operation with the prosecuting authorities is a precondition for that. I suspect that the real issue is the renewable residency permit requirement. The key to that is the proper identification of victims. At the Council of Europe session on that last year, the Government set out a new process for the identification of victims, with the prime responsibility lying with the police and the ultimate decision resting with the Border and Immigration Agency, with the right for review at the request of a non-governmental organisation. However, that process is heavily dependent on effective training, so perhaps the Minister could say what progress has been made on that.
	We welcome the support that has been given to victims, but we are concerned about the future security of the system because we understand that the funding as it stands will last only until 2008. In particular, what support is being given to the devolved Administrations? The fact remains that there is no support for victims of labour trafficking, and there are significant concerns about the support for child victims. It is also interesting that the criminal injuries compensation scheme has at long last recognised trafficking as a crime and has started to award compensation.
	We welcome the decision to reconsider the UK's reservation to the UN convention on the rights of the child over immigration matters. The Government say that children are fully protected by existing law, so we cannot see what objection there could be to lifting the reservation, although the Under-Secretary indicated when he wrote to me about the matter that there would be no preconditions on that review.
	Labour trafficking remains a serious issue, particularly in relation to domestic servitude. As has been mentioned, the visa regime prevents a change of employer, meaning that people are hostages and become open to abuse. We were told last summer that the Government would consult publicly on the safeguards in the business visa arrangements. I should like to know what progress has been made on that and whether the Government will consider naming and shaming employers of trafficked labour, particularly in the agricultural and catering sectors, where there seems to have been very little progress indeed and certainly a lack of support for the victims.
	We in the Committee also recommended that the Government should publish an annual report to Parliament. The Government say that there will be an annual updating of the action plan and an annual report from the UK Human Trafficking Centre at the end of the financial year. That is all welcome but, given the cross-party interest that has been shown in the issue, it is important that the Government should pull those different strands together and provide the House with an annual report on the progress being made. That is the best way that we can monitor what is happening.
	The Joint Committee on Human Rights will continue to maintain a keen interest in the subject. We will continue to press the Government on the need for progress. I know that we are pushing against an open door with my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary, although I am not quite so sure that that is the case elsewhere. However, I assure him and the House that the issue is close to our hearts and that we will continue to pursue it until we see justice for the victims of trafficking.

Several hon. Members: rose —

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I remind the House that there is an eight-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches, although I think that that has now become obvious to everyone. I call Mr. Anthony Steen.

Hon. Members: Hear, hear!

Anthony Steen: I am grateful for the support of my hon. Friends and other hon. Members.
	We know that the Government have been active on the legislative front, and I think that they have done a good job. However, I shall point out some of the things that they have not done, and I hope that that will be constructive. However, it is not only the Government who have been active; the Joint Committee on Human Rights has also been very helpful and active. I should also like to note that there have also been three debates on trafficking in the past year.
	Back-Bench Members of the House of Commons and of the House of Lords, of all parties, were particularly active in the establishment of the all-party group on trafficking of women and children—of which I am chairman—on 9 July 2006. That group does not just meet the bigwigs; it has also got its hands dirty down at the rock face. It has met African child victims of trafficking, eastern Europeans, Vietnamese trafficked children involved with cannabis factories and, most recently, Roma children on the streets of London. That group has tabled more than 100 oral and written parliamentary questions, which have stimulated further Government action. My thanks go to all the officers involved. My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) is the astute treasurer of the group, and it has other distinguished members here and in the other place.
	The Government's major problem is their inability to provide accurate figures on anything to do with human trafficking. The most reliable figures came from Operation Pentameter 1, which are very modest, and we have not had the results from Operation Pentameter 2 yet, so we have no idea of the scale of human trafficking. We talk with great emotion about it, but we have no idea of its scale. The Government are appallingly bad at providing information. In answer to a written question from the hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran), the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker) said:
	"Data on the numbers of children and unaccompanied minors trafficked into the UK for each year since 2000 are not centrally recorded."—[ Official Report, 12 December 2006; Vol. 454, c. 1053W.]
	Nobody has any idea what the numbers are.
	Human trafficking has not only attracted a huge official infrastructure; it also has a huge vocabulary. The definition of "human trafficking" is not clear. Sex trafficking gets endless newspaper coverage in the tabloids, but confusion still exists between sex trafficking and prostitution. Human trafficking involves not only sexual exploitation but exploitation of labour such as domestic servitude, forced labour, begging and benefit fraud. It does not only involve women; it also involves men, including young men, and young children. Children under 10—which means they have no criminal liability—are being brought over to Britain by their extended family, having been trained in eastern Europe by people like Fagin in "Oliver Twist". They are forced to work in a range of criminal activities such as shoplifting, theft and automated teller machine—ATM—fraud. A talented under-10-year-old can earn between £50,000 and £100,000 a year for the gangs that they work for.
	The inability of this country to handle this problem is well illustrated by my experience on the beat on Oxford street as part of the police service parliamentary scheme. We apprehended a young Romanian girl at Marble Arch underground station. We believe that there were other children there, but they disappeared very quickly when we arrived. She refused to co-operate or to tell us who she was, where she lived or how old she was. The police officers took her to Marylebone police station as a place of safety. She had no money on her, only a return underground ticket. She refused to speak English, although she attended a school here and could speak the language. An interpreter was called for, at public expense. On searching her, she was found to have shoplifted goods on her, but their value was so small—under £20—that the police did not prosecute her. She had to be released from police custody and the social services in Haringey—which is where she said that she lived—said that they could not look after her. She is one of the many children from eastern Europe trafficked by gangs to work on the streets. Oxford street is full of such children. How are we going to deal with this?
	Will the Minister reconsider all the cases in the past few years in which children have been prosecuted and criminalised for theft or for cannabis cultivation, in the light of the new Crown Prosecution Service guidance, which states that they should be treated as victims of trafficking, not as criminals? Will he confirm that no such children who have been apprehended and prosecuted in this way are in prison? I believe that such children are being wrongly criminalised.
	A further problem with trafficked children is that they often go missing from social services care within 24 hours, and often within three hours. The ECPAT report "Missing Out", produced in 2007, revealed that in three local authority areas, of the 80 reported cases of known or suspected child victims of trafficking, 48 had gone missing from social services care. They go in one door and come out of the other. The Government report—I think that it was a Serious and Organised Crime Agency report—produced in June 2007 revealed that, of the 330 supposed victims of child trafficking, 183 had gone missing without trace.
	In answer to my question of 30 October 2007, the Home Secretary confirmed that in West Sussex, which covers the Gatwick airport complex, 50 children from abroad went missing from care between 2004 and 2006. In Hillingdon, which contains Heathrow, 74 children were reported missing in 2006 alone. The reason why children disappear from care is that their traffickers are the only people they know in this country—the children do not speak our language—and the only people they can rely on. They have been brainwashed not to trust anybody in authority, let alone the social services or the police.
	How can we start to help such children out of their miserable existence and to make them a priority? The problem is compounded by the diversionary activity of numerous officials who attend conferences and meetings all over the world—with upwards of 600 delegates, including lawyers, experts, officials and diplomats. Those conferences cost millions of pounds of public money, as the delegates travel first class, but those officials talk rather than focus on the real problems. Such money would be far better used to fund refuges, which often barely scrape by, to provide safe havens for trafficked children. Many refuges in the EU do not receive public funding. The POPPY project is the only refuge in the UK to receive a Government grant, while the position of east European countries' refuges is particularly dire. Why does the EU not help them? While diplomats munch in style, the people at the grass roots and the victims remain penniless.
	The Government must start to collect reliable data and statistics on trafficking in the UK. They keep promising, but they cannot deliver. With the police powerless to act against child trafficking of the under-10s and with human trafficking not being a police performance indicator, with social services losing children and with the immigration services having little expertise to identify victims and being unable to stop EU passport holders, the situation is now desperate.
	According to the former Minister for Women and Equality, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn):
	"We are leading Europe on providing for victims and ensuring that people are recognised at ports."
	—[ Official Report, 22 February 2007; Vol. 457, c. 404.]
	That is just not true. As we conclude the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, we have a new chapter and a new form of slavery right on our doorstep. History is repeating itself and we have not learned the lessons.

John Austin: I start my speech where the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) finished his by drawing that comparison between the current horrendous slavery that we face today and that of the past. According to the International Labour Organisation, the estimated minimum number of persons exploited as a result of trafficking at a given time is approaching 2.5 million—an estimate made in 2005—but many hon. Members believe that the real figure today is much higher.
	As my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) said earlier, most people are trafficked for sexual exploitation, but he also referred to economic exploitation, and some people are trafficked for other reasons. There is also now the additional horrendous crime of trafficking in humans for organ donation. As other hon. Members have noted, trafficking in human beings is now the third most profitable criminal activity in the world after illegal drugs and arms trafficking.
	We are debating today a Council of Europe convention on trafficking. Like other hon. Members, I have served on the UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which comprises national delegations from 47 European parliaments. I have recently been elected vice-chair of the Assembly's sub-committee on trafficking in human beings, whose aim is to campaign to promote the widest possible signature and ratification of the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings, so that it can come into force not only at the earliest opportunity, but with the widest possible ratification.
	We are pleased to note that the convention will enter into force on 1 February, following the 10th ratification by Cyprus. However, entry into force is not an end in itself. To be successful, it must enter into effect in all the member states of greater Europe and in other parts of the world, providing a global response to a global problem. The wider the ratification, the better the protection for victims, as the convention can reach its full potential only when it is ratified by all the countries of Europe and beyond.
	To help parliamentarians and people who want to promote the widest ratification of the convention, the sub-committee has drawn up a handbook for parliamentarians, which I commend to Members. In the wider sphere, the Inter-Parliamentary Union is contemplating drawing up a worldwide handbook. I am pleased to note that my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, with his great knowledge and expertise, will represent the British group of the IPU at a conference in Vienna next month on drawing up that handbook.
	The convention can make a genuine difference, not only to prevention but to victims of this crime. Some have questioned the need for another convention, saying that there are already laws and international agreements. It is true that we have the United Nations protocol—the Palermo protocol—and the convention against transnational organised crime to prevent and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children. We also have the European Union directive of 29 April 2004 on the residence permit issued to third-country national victims of trafficking, or to third-country nationals who have been the subject of an action to facilitate illegal migration and who co-operate with the competent authorities. We have the EU Council framework decision of 19 July 2002 on combating trafficking in human beings, and we have the action plan from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe to combat trafficking in human beings. So why do we need a new convention?
	We need a new convention simply because the existing international texts either are not sufficiently binding or take account of just one aspect of the problem. The geographical setting of the Council of Europe enables countries of origin, transit and destination to agree on a common binding policy against trafficking. The main reason we need this convention, however, is that none of the aforementioned legal instruments focus on victims of trafficking. The Council of Europe convention is the first international instrument to focus on the victims, and that is its added value. One of the primary concerns of the Council of Europe is to safeguard and protect human rights, and trafficking in human beings directly undermines the values on which the Council is based.
	Other Members have referred to the Government's slowness to sign the convention. I think that the arguments about the dangers to our immigration policy—the "pull factor"—were spurious, and that the Joint Committee on Human Rights was correct to say
	"It is not credible to suggest that a woman would voluntarily submit to indeterminate sexual slavery of the most brutal kind for the purpose of obtaining UK residency."
	I am pleased to observe the progress that has been made. It is true that the pressure to persuade the Government to sign was exerted on a cross-party basis, and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Totnes for not just his knowledge of the situation but his determination. I also pay tribute to members of the Council of Europe delegation across the parties: to my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) and my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Chris McCafferty), and to the hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway), who is no longer present, and the Baroness Knight of Collingtree. There has been a cross-party consensus on the issue, and I think that some of our debates on it have shown Parliament at its best. Parliamentarians have worked together to achieve a common goal.
	The features of the convention that are important and illustrate why we should ratify it include compulsory assistance measures and a "recovery and reflection" period for victims of trafficking; the possibility of delivering residence permits to victims not only on the basis of co-operation with law enforcement authorities, but on humanitarian and human rights grounds; a non-punishment clause for victims of trafficking; a strengthened international co-operation scheme; and the independent monitoring system, GRETA, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon referred.
	My hon. Friend also expressed one of my own concerns. The Ministers who are contracting parties to the convention will determine its procedures, the appointment procedures for the members of GRETA and the way in which they will work. If we have not yet ratified the convention by the time those discussions take place, what input will we have, and what consultation will we have with non-governmental organisations and other stakeholders to ensure GRETA's independence?
	Finally, let me raise two issues that others have mentioned. Both my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon and the hon. Member for Totnes have referred to the disappeared children on other occasions. In an earlier debate, the hon. Member for Totnes spoke of the international activity over one child who had tragically disappeared, and the media speculation and coverage of that one child, and contrasted that with the amount that we read in the national press about children who have gone missing from care. There is also the issue of unaccompanied minors who disappear. Do we know where they are, and do we know how many may have disappeared into the sex trade in Italy? We are becoming not only a country of destination, but a country of transit. That is why we need ratification, and we need it early. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister wishes to see that done with minimum delay.
	I welcome the guidance that the Government have produced and the statement that the Home Secretary has made this week. I think that there is a determination in the House and on the part of the Government. I hope that the motion will not need to be subject to a vote this evening.

Hugo Swire: This has been an informative and educative debate. In the few minutes that I have, I want to concentrate on the most vulnerable in society, about whom we have heard so much this afternoon—the children.
	According to the US State Department, 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year. Approximately 50 per cent. of them are minors. In a world that is opening up so fast, the challenge is how to control and monitor who is travelling where, when and why, and often whom they are travelling with. That is why I believe firmly that a co-ordinated border policy, starting with our airlines and airports, as well as gold-plated ratification of the Council of Europe's convention on action against trafficking in human beings, offers our best hope to end the trafficking of children into the United Kingdom.
	Children are trafficked into the UK using many different forms of transport, but I want to focus on the airlines. As the Minister will know, no data are available regarding the percentage of children trafficked into the UK via airlines because there is no central data collection on children trafficked into the UK. However, it is known that children are trafficked into the UK and are arriving at airports across the country, including at smaller regional airports frequented by budget airlines.
	There are no global standards or regulations related to the age at which a child can travel alone by air transport. Airlines vary enormously in their standards. For example, Virgin, which sets a good standard, insists that children between the ages of five and 15 must be registered in advance of travel for the unaccompanied minor service, or be accompanied by someone aged 16 or over. Children above 16 can travel alone. Children can travel alone with easyJet from the age of 14, with British Airways from the age of 12 and, amazingly, from the age of just four with Air France.
	To protect children and to prevent trafficking, there must be checks and balances at every point in the journey—from pre-check-in until immigration services on arrival. The airlines themselves have an important part to play, yet it is my understanding that they have not been involved in policy development to any degree. I would be interested to hear from the Minister if that is the case and if so how he intends to rectify what is clearly a serious oversight.

Anthony Steen: Is my hon. Friend aware that children from Vietnam and China check in, show their passports and then, during the journey to Britain, flush their passports down the loo or even eat them, so that when they get to Heathrow or Gatwick, they have no papers at all? People have to photostat their passports in China or Vietnam and send them by wire to Britain, so that when the children arrive we know who they are.

Hugo Swire: When my hon. Friend made that point about 10 minutes ago, I was amazed. I remain amazed. It is a good point and no doubt the Minister will wish to reflect on it, although there are issues about taking records at the point of departure.
	A useful point to return to is the findings from Operation Paladin, run by the Metropolitan police in 2004. It involved the immigration service, Hillingdon social services and secondees from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The operation risk assessed children arriving at Heathrow airport over three months without their parents or legal guardians, and social services followed up those considered at risk. In total, 1,738 unaccompanied minors passed through immigration services in that period. Not all of them were trafficked, but it shows the number of children who travel unaccompanied. That did not include EU nationals or British children. The Paladin team risk-assessed 551 children, or 30 per cent., based on a list of indicators considered by police to indicate that something was not quite right. The largest risk group were African teenage girls.
	UNICEF showed that, in an 18-month period, 330 children were believed to have been trafficked into the UK. Of that total—we have heard a lot about this—183 went missing from the care of social services. Most appallingly, there is evidence that many children may still be under the control of traffickers while they are in local authority care, let alone those who went missing from it.
	There is currently no safe accommodation providing 24-hour care for trafficked children, and as a result many of them end up in foster care, hostels or even bed-and-breakfast accommodation. I hope that the Minister will extend funding to the POPPY project to look after such vulnerable children and provide professional support and, critically, counselling where appropriate.
	Many young victims of trafficking are awaiting asylum determinations whose age is disputed by local authority social services and the Home Office Border and Immigration Agency. If their age is assessed as 18 or over, they are placed in the adult system, which does not provide for safe accommodation and support services for age-disputed victims, unless, of course, they get access to the POPPY project. ECPAT UK found child-trafficked victim identification
	"to be ad hoc, unsystematic and sometimes accidental; information is not always recorded or passed on to relevant agencies; and children might be in the looked-after system for some time before they are identified as a victim of trafficking."
	How will the Government ensure that both the Home Office Border and Immigration Agency and social services comply with the 2005 Council of Europe convention against trafficking in human beings on the provision of accommodation and support to age-disputed young victims of trafficking?
	Like all Members, I welcomed the decision to ratify the convention, but the Government need not wait until the end of the year to instigate these recommendations, and I hope that they do not prevaricate any further. In order to combat the sexual exploitation of children, there must be a comprehensive, co-ordinated partnership between many groups—not only the police and the Home Office, but prosecutors, lawyers, embassies, non-governmental organisations, the travel industry and the media. Trafficking in children is an escalating problem, although how big it is is debatable, so I hope that the Minister will commission authoritative research to provide hard facts and evidence to inform the debate. As yet, there is no system of best practice in the travel industry, no consistent multi-agency approach at borders, no systematic tracking or spot checks and a weak support structure. I await the Minister's recommendations with hope that he will grasp this nettle.
	In 21st century Britain, it is frankly an outrage that child trafficking can exist. The Government must now act with greater speed and clarity, and provide the requisite resources to stamp out this unacceptable practice.

Keith Vaz: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Devon (Mr. Swire), and to have been listening to such an important debate with so many excellent contributions, such as those from the Minister and the hon. Members for Ashford (Damian Green) and for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne). I was going to say that we cannot put a cigarette paper between the Front-Bench positions, but we are not allowed to talk about cigarettes any longer, of course.
	All Members understand the seriousness of the issue under discussion. As we have heard, the phrase "human trafficking" covers a wide variety of behaviour, ranging from the experiences of the illegal immigrants from China who worked as cockle pickers at Morecambe bay to the abused women, many from within the European Union, who are tricked into working in the sex industry in the United Kingdom. Although recent operations in our country have focused on the sex trade, as the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) pointed out in his eloquent speech, there are other issues such as bonded labour in areas such as domestic service and the restaurant trade that involve even more people, so the effects might be even wider than the experts present today believe.
	The hon. Member for East Devon quoted State Department figures. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that 1 million people are trafficked across borders each year, and the trade generates $32 billion a year worldwide, making it the third biggest earner for organised crime gangs after illegal drugs and arms trafficking. Although estimates vary, it is agreed that thousands of people are trafficked into our country every year. I take on board the point made by Members that it is important that we have up-to-date figures from the Government on how many people are involved. Victims of trafficking are sold from gang to gang and are moved across the UK and between the UK and other EU member states by the people who seek to exploit them, which makes the detection of these people very difficult indeed.
	I, like other hon. Members, warmly welcome the Government's decision, announced by the Home Secretary yesterday and reinforced by the Minister today, to ratify the European convention on human trafficking. Obviously, we all hope that that happens as quickly as possible, although the timetable given suggests that it should happen by the end of the year.
	I also welcome the effects of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, which this Government introduced. Some £109,328 has been seized by my local Leicestershire police force as a result of the operation of that legislation. I congratulate the Home Office on other significant measures, such as the creation of the UK Human Trafficking Centre in 2006 to ensure that the response of our various police forces is co-ordinated.
	Yesterday, I met Kate Allen from Amnesty International. Although she praised what the Government have done, she raised a number of issues concerning the identification of trafficking victims and touched on many of the points raised by hon. Members on both sides of the House about the immigration implications for those who are left in this country.
	The Home Affairs Committee has considered a number of those aspects. It has examined aspects of immigration, asylum law and human trafficking. I am pleased to tell the House that we decided at our previous meeting to initiate a full inquiry into human trafficking, whereby the Committee will try to establish the scale and type of human trafficking and the way in which investigations can identify the victims, and make recommendations and suggestions to the Government.
	The inquiry will almost certainly examine the issue of international co-operation with other EU member states and with the new transit countries, such as Ukraine, Moldova and Croatia. We hope, of course, to take evidence from the Minister. I am pleased to say that we agreed to ask the hon. Member for Totnes to give evidence to help us examine how we can obtain good information. As other hon. Members have done today, I bend my knee to his vast experience on this issue.
	The inquiry will hear from the Border and Immigration Agency and the Serious Organised Crime Agency. We will almost certainly visit a number of EU and other countries. I am not sure that we will follow the Minister around Europe, but I know that Ukraine and Moldova, and possibly Lithuania or Poland, have been mentioned as places to visit. We are, of course, the Home Affairs Committee, so we do not intend to spend too much time abroad, but it is important to examine the source countries to ensure that we are able to track what is happening.
	I am certain that the inquiry will be thorough and will go a long way in helping the Government to take the right steps forward, in eradicating this terrible problem and in trying to deal with the far-reaching problem of organised crime in this area. These women and children often come to Britain in the hope of a better life, and it is this House's duty, as reflected in the comments made by hon. Members on both sides of the House, to ensure that that is exactly what they get. They must not be exploited in the way that they have been in the past.

Stephen Crabb: It is a pleasure to follow the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz). I welcome this timely debate. It is right that we collectively, as parliamentarians, demonstrate our shared commitment today to tackling this evil activity, at a time when other countries are trying to demonstrate that they are doing their bit. For example, last Friday the United States held a national day of human trafficking awareness. It had been initiated by the US Congress to try to raise the American public's consciousness of this issue.
	Many hon. Members have referred to similar sets of data on the scale of the problem, which have come from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the International Labour Organisation and the US State Department. There is common agreement on the size and scope of the international problem. My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) was right to identify just how thin the data are on victims of human trafficking in the UK. That will be a real barrier to effective Government action to tackle the problem. Unless there is more serious research and a much better understanding of the nature of the problem within our own borders, we will come up against that barrier, which will be difficult to overcome in terms of securing effective action.
	I spent the earlier part of today looking through the national action plan that the Home Office produced last year. It attempts to set out some specific objectives for tackling the problem. However, that was a year ago and there was a push to produce the document to coincide with the bicentennial of the abolition of slavery. A year later, more information has come to light and progress has been made on the ratification of the convention, so it is time for a revamped and updated national action plan. It is right that we should review the situation each year and assess how well we are meeting the objectives. We should also question whether the objectives are the right ones and will be effective in tackling the problem.
	Most of the debate this afternoon has focused on the problem of trafficking within our borders. Actually, most of the victims of trafficking globally are outside Britain, in the developing world. This afternoon and this evening, thousands of women from eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc will be working on the streets and in thousands of brothels in communities up and down this country, but we should not forget the faces of the other victims of trafficking internationally. Young Burmese boys continue to be plucked from street corners and bus stations in Burma and forcibly conscripted into the army. The gangster regime in Burma has created the army with the largest proportion of child soldiers in the world, and most of them have been forcibly conscripted and many trafficked. I also think of some of the children whom I met near Hyderabad in India last year. They were from the Dalit community—the untouchable caste—and victims of trafficking, working in a bonded labour scenario. Trafficking has multiple facets and many faces, and we should not forget that most of its victims are outside this country.
	It is vital that we have a new, integrated border security force and I strongly the support the commitment by my party to instigate such a force, especially if resources can be found to restore some of the border security at Welsh ports. I represent a seat in west Wales that has two ferry ports with connections to Ireland, and there is a growing concern in Wales that the four ports that link to Ireland are being used as a back-door alternative trafficking route from the continent, through Ireland and into the UK. That issue has been raised with me by police officers confidentially back home in Pembrokeshire. It was also identified in a report last year by the Welsh Assembly Government. I therefore urge the Minister to take that into consideration as he and his colleagues assess the issue of border security and what can be done to choke off the supply of trafficked people through UK borders. In recent years, there have been many cuts to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, so we no longer have any permanent customs cover at the two ferry ports of Pembroke Dock and Fishguard in my constituency.
	On the issue of convictions for trafficking offences, my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes hit the nail on the head when he highlighted the disparity between the number of prosecutions and the number of convictions. What work has been done to identify the barriers to achieving successful convictions of those who are charged with trafficking offences? If we understood what those barriers are, it could lead to more effective police training and, I hope, to more convictions.

Anthony Steen: Is not the problem with prosecutions and convictions that the women are not prepared to give evidence against their traffickers? The women have no security, other than their families back home, and they do not have identity cards that would enable them to stay on in Britain. Those are the two reasons why we do not obtain more convictions.

Stephen Crabb: Again, my hon. Friend brings his experience, knowledge and good judgment to the debate. I hope that that has been noted by the Ministers.
	Let me move from the subject of supply to that of demand. We have a real problem in this country with a booming sex industry that lumps together a whole set of legal and illegal activities. They range from legal and illegal pornography through legal and illegal lap-dancing clubs to prostitution, which takes many different forms and is conducted in many different places. I sense an element of schizophrenia in how we think about the problem. There is gross moral outrage when we talk about human trafficking and people who are forced into sexual slavery in this country, yet when we talk about prostitution we almost stand back, afraid of climbing down from our position of liberal neutrality. We cannot tackle a large part of the trafficking problem in this country unless we start to tackle the growth of the sex industry. The growing demand from British men for easily available paid-for sex is largely driving the supply of trafficked women into this country.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) mentioned the change that has taken place over the past 10 years. We have gone from a situation where 85 per cent. of those working in prostitution were from the UK to one where an estimated 85 per cent. are foreign. Such a massive change will have come about in one of two ways: either through a huge fall in the number of domestic girls and young women working in the sex trade, or through a massive increase in the supply of foreign women to meet additional demand. I think that the latter has happened.
	Demand is booming for easily available paid-for sex and it is being met by women who have, effectively, been imported. That is backed up by some research that I read earlier today, which suggested that the proportion of men who admit to paying for sex has more than doubled in the past 10 years from about 2 per cent. to 4 or 4.5 per cent. That backs up my assertion about the growing demand in this country for paid-for sex. I pay tribute to the work on that point done by the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and to the tone that she has struck.
	In my last 20 seconds of allotted time, I shall make a final point about victims. The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon) talked about transferring knowledge from this country to countries from which people are being trafficked. There is also a need to learn from some of the excellent initiatives on the ground in those countries when we work with the victims of trafficking in this country.

Denis MacShane: In the spirit of bipartisanship, I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) as well as many other colleagues. In January 2006, I had the pleasure of publishing an article in  The Daily Telegraph to urge the signature and ratification of the convention on action against trafficking. A year later, the shadow Home Secretary, the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green), came on board. The campaign was already well under way thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) and, in particular, the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) and his all-party group. They all raised the issue repeatedly in oral questions, Home Office questions and directly with the Prime Minister.
	A year ago, I received a letter from the then Prime Minister. He said that signing the Council of Europe convention would
	"send a strong signal that as well as commemorating the abolition of slavery, we are also taking action to eradicate modern forms of slavery and discrimination, such as human trafficking."
	Two years after we began the campaign, the fact that we have signed and ratified the convention is cause for modest parliamentary celebration. It shows that working in Europe and accepting some derogation of our sovereignty in agreeing to change our laws at the behest of a European agency is something that all parties can support.
	I should like to take this opportunity to join others in thanking Ministers—especially my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker), and my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General, as well as my right hon. Friend the Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing—for showing leadership and courage in facing down objections from Whitehall officials on this measure. No one should underestimate how far we have come in two years, or the extent to which political leadership and parliamentary pressure have changed the story.
	I want to focus on the problem of the young women, many of them under 18 years of age, who are trafficked to work as prostitutes in Britain. I and other hon. Members have raised this matter in the House, usually to the scorn and sniggers of the sketch-writers and commentators—the lads with the laptops, so to speak. They find that any threat to what they consider to be men's inalienable right to buy sex from women, even when they are forced, beaten, trafficked or trapped into prostitution, is something that simply has to be dismissed.
	I hope that the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) will not take it awry when I say that I was dismayed to hear his contribution to last Sunday's "The World This Weekend" programme. He attacked those of us who want to tackle the demand side of sex-slave prostitution for being engaged on some sort of moral campaign.

Peter Bone: I was not attacking anyone on a moral basis. The debate about prostitution is very important, but I do not believe that banning or liberalising prostitution can have any effect on human trafficking. Whichever we do, the trafficking will continue.

Stephen Crabb: indicated dissent.

Denis MacShane: The hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire was shaking his head vigorously during that intervention. I expect that we shall return to this discussion. I mean no negative comment on what the hon. Gentleman has said, as his position is shared by many men and by a number of women, but the debate is out in the open and we must get our response right. I happen to think that slowing down the ever-increasing demand in this country for sex slaves, many of whom are still children, is morally a good thing.
	Along with Ministers and other hon. Members, I have embarked on a campaign to encourage men to take responsibility for their part in sustaining this modern form of slavery. The ever-growing demand that I have described gives rise to advertisements for brothels in newspapers that state, for example, that fresh girls are imported every week. Without that demand, there would be a smaller supply of sex slaves.

Stephen Crabb: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Denis MacShane: I am able to take two interventions, apparently, and then my time will run out. I give way to the hon. Gentleman.

Stephen Crabb: The right hon. Gentleman is making an important point, but is he aware that a mainstream evening newspaper in south Wales carried a front-page story last October about raids on brothels in Cardiff where trafficked women were working as prostitutes? Further into the paper, however, it printed adverts in its advertising section for exactly the same brothels that were being reported on the front page.

Denis MacShane: Voltaire defined hypocrisy as the compliment that vice pays to virtue, and never was that more accurate than in the case of that south Wales newspaper.
	I am delighted to see that my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House has taken her place on the Front Bench, along with my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House. My right hon. and learned Friend has taken a lot of unfair criticism since she very bravely raised this matter on the "Today" programme just before Christmas, but this is a debate whose time has come. It will not be easy, but the discussion has to begin.

Bob Spink: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Denis MacShane: If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I really cannot, as an eight-minute limit has been imposed on speeches. I am sure that he will have other chances to make points in the weeks and months ahead.
	What are the figures? I confess that no one can supply a fully accurate figure for the number of women trafficked into Britain for sexual slavery purposes. By definition, however, people being trafficked in and out of the UK sex-slave trade are not going to queue up at a border control to announce their arrival.
	On 19 October 2005, that fine newspaper the  Daily Mirror carried the headline "25,000 Sex Slaves on The Streets of Britain". I was once a  Daily Mirror reporter, so I trust the report that appeared beneath, which stated:
	"The Home Office believes between 2,000 and 6,000 women are brought in each year. Many are made to have sex with up to 30 men a day. Police say there could even be up to 50,000 women from every continent working in most cities."
	I do not know whether those figures are right; I am quoting the  Daily Mirror citing the Home Office two years ago.
	The rather ludicrous claim is advanced that because the number of prosecutions and convictions for trafficking has been low, and because the recorded number of foreign nationals detained following raids on brothels and massage parlours is low, there is not really a problem. That argument has been advanced not in this House but by a huge number of people commenting after the interview given by my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House. It is like arguing that as the number of rape convictions is low, there are not many rapes in Britain.
	The defenders of men's right to have sex when they like, as often as they like, in any manner they like, with any teenage girl they like—those penetrating columnists with their defence of unlimited male penetration—need to examine the statistics with more care. The Council of Europe and many other international agencies—the UN, the International Labour Organisation, the International Organisation for Migration and the OSCE—as well as national Governments and non-governmental organisations, have tried to establish the true figures.
	The ILO, to which I am grateful for the material that it sent me yesterday, reckons that there are 2.45 million victims of trafficking. The US Government estimate that 80 per cent. of trafficking victims are female, and that 70 per cent. of them are trafficked for sexual exploitation, meaning that up to 1,658,000 women are trafficked each year for sexual purposes, of whom up to 225,000 are trafficked into industrial countries such as the UK. The Dutch reckon that there are about 3,500 victims of sex trafficking in their country, and the US Government believe that up to 17,500 women are trafficked into the USA each year for sex purposes, notably to provide internet porn for the world's masturbators.
	The ILO has estimated the profits per victim of sex slave trafficking at between $60,000 and $70,000 a year. An extra 40,000 prostitutes were said to have been imported into Germany just to service World cup fans in 2006; I am not sure whether English demand dried up after our boys' heroic performance. There will not be a problem, of course, for English fans at the next World cup.
	Those are some of the figures that we must consider. I put them on the record because I hope that they will balance the view that there is not really much of a problem and that the sex-slave industry is just a happy business of consenting adults exchanging money for services rendered. There may be some contented belles de jour or happy hookers, but every survey shows that most prostitutes and sex slaves would quit the industry if they were not obliged to service men to pay for a drugs habit or debts or, in the case of foreign women, if they were not kept in fear by brutal pimps. That is why a number of us on both sides of the Chamber have raised the issue of the demand side of the question of ever-increasing prostitution.
	In signing and ratifying the convention the Government have done well, but as long as there is an incessant demand for paid-for sex, trafficking will increase to supply it. I know that calling for some control of demand brings down the wrath of the media establishment; I hope that the Opposition Member who winds up will address that point and say whether they support the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire and the Leader of the House. Ministers have been to Sweden to see the impact of putting the responsibility on men rather than women for criminal activity in the sex-slave industry, and the House will listen to their reports with interest.
	A national debate has begun. I know that the position that I am defending is unpopular; it is attacked by much of the establishment media. Making men responsible and accountable for their actions is the best way to slow down and turn back the rising tide of sex slavery and trafficking. I welcome the ratification. I do not think that there is any need for the House to press the motion to a Division. I note the references in the Opposition motion to Europol and Eurojust, but as the hon. Member for Totnes said, Europol cannot agree even on common statistics. Frankly, we need more European co-operation on the matter. We need a European bureau of investigation to tackle trafficking. That would mean co-operating fully in Europe. I just point out to Conservative Members where their arguments may take them.

Several hon. Members: rose —

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Before I call the next hon. Member to speak, I should just say to the House that although interventions gain extra time for the hon. Member addressing the House, they do of course have the unfortunate side effect of possibly squeezing other Members out of the debate.

Mike Hancock: I point out to the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane), in case he missed it, that the England team have not yet failed to qualify for the World cup; they failed to qualify for the European cup. I ask him not to wish it on them.
	The Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker), and everyone else who has spoken have shown a great commitment to the issue that we are discussing. I pay tribute to all who have contributed for the effort that they have put into it. I have been working on the issue for the past 15 years. For the last 10, I have been heavily involved in the work of the Council of Europe. I congratulate the British parliamentary delegation from all parties and both Houses. Over that time, it has played a significant part in forcing the subject on to the agenda. It was the driving force behind a new commitment to the issue of trafficking.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne), who led for the Liberal Democrats, mentioned some of the countries that had not yet signed the convention. Those countries, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain, have not wanted to get involved because of the repercussions internally. They would have to face up to the reality of prosecuting those from whom many of them seek to gain votes. In Italy, 50,000 young girls, under age, are employed in the sex industry and are probably having sex with five clients a night, five nights a week. There are millions and millions of illegal sex acts in Italy, but very few men have been prosecuted by the Italian authorities for having sex with under-age girls.
	The right hon. Member for Rotherham was right in what he said about trying to do something about demand. It is too easy to criticise such countries as Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria and Ukraine and to say that they are driving the industry, but that is not the case; the issue is where the demand lies.
	I had the misfortune to meet a man from Moldova who had had an operation in Turkey to have an organ removed. He was quite open about it. He was dying from the consequences of blood poisoning that he had contracted during the operation. He claimed that the organ was received by a British citizen who had gone to Turkey for the operation. It was done not in some back-street workshop but by sophisticated doctors and nurses who knew what they were doing. Presumably, the recipient of that kidney paid a fortune for the operation. The chap from Moldova got $1,000 and death. Many of the journeys of the trafficked start in desperation and, sadly, many, if not all, end in despair, and an increasing number end in death.
	We must appreciate the size of the problem. It is not just a matter of knowing the figures. There is universal agreement in the House that we are talking about a very big issue. The Minister is to be congratulated on the robust way in which he put his case today, and on accepting that we must get to grips with the size of the problem. There has been a slow—sometimes painfully slow—recognition of trafficking right across the world, but particularly in Europe. It is a disgrace that all 47 countries of the Council of Europe have not, as a duty, signed and ratified the convention.
	The issue of co-operation is fraught. The right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) is no longer present, but he asked for people to give evidence to his Committee. When the Council of Europe committee on which I served wanted evidence, we did not have to go very far from the home of the legislation that we are discussing. Less than half a kilometre away in Strasbourg, there were hundreds of women plying their trade not in brothels or massage parlours, but on the streets. So when the group that was looking into the issue wanted information, we went out with a team and spoke to a group of girls.
	We met girls from 18 countries in the course of three hours. Some of them gave graphic details and some of them, surprisingly, had the dates that the European Parliament met in Strasbourg because they said that those were good weeks for them. The home of human rights is one of the bastions supporting the demand for the trade. We had the misfortune to meet a young lady whose sister had been killed and her body dumped in the Rhine. Both sisters had been trafficked not once, but twice. Why twice? Because they were both returned from the United Kingdom. They were found and returned. Why were they trafficked again? It was because, as hon. Members have said, there would have been problems and consequences for their family if they had not co-operated. Those girls were forced—not physically, but by the mental pressure of the threat that there would have been to their family's very existence and life in Moldova if they had not co-operated with the traffickers. Once again, they were back on the streets.
	I turn now to the issue of the children. I understand why it is difficult for local authorities to hold on to them—the law does not allow us to lock them in; they are not kept in secure units. Why are those children kept so close to the very streets from which they have been brought? The traffickers and organisers know only too well where they are. I agreed with the Minister when he said that one of the problems of having safe havens all over the place is that the traffickers know and recognise them. They haunt those places and drive on the evil trade.
	We have to find new approaches. I was delighted when the Minister said that he had an open mind and wanted people with ideas to come forward with them. One of the issues is that children should not be kept close to where they are found. There should be widespread co-operation to make that happen. Another issue relates to the disclosure of information between our police force and others; there is wholesale police corruption in many of the countries. Many allow the trade to continue and are significant beneficiaries of it. If we give information, it is disseminated within hours of being received and the traffickers know whom to go after and punish.
	Why does that happen? It is because, as every Member who has spoken in this debate clearly recognises, drugs, guns and the trafficking of human beings are the big money earners in the underworld across the globe. That is why we have to find new approaches to the issue. I hope that they will be found faster in this country because of the unity in the Chamber tonight and the excellence of this debate.

Ann McKechin: This debate has understandably concentrated on the enforcement in the UK of the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings. However, I should like to consider the underlying causes of human trafficking.
	Human trafficking emerges from poverty, conflict and bad governance. The world is facing an unprecedented rise in population, and with that has come increased urbanisation of the poor and marginalised. Underpinning that is the problem of unemployment. Current figures estimate that about 185 million people are officially registered as unemployed. However, the International Labour Organisation estimates that if we also take into account the under-employed and working poor, the figure is about 1.5 billion people—that is, 30 per cent. of the working-age population of the world. Nearly half of them are under 24 years of age, although that age group represents only one quarter of the working-age population.
	The 2007 edition of the World Bank's world development report reveals that in the next decade the world will see the largest-ever proportion of youth population in its history. There are 1.5 billion people in the world aged between 12 and 24, and 1.3 billion live in developing countries. Countries with the highest incidence of poverty are almost all in eastern and western Africa. We have seen the human suffering and consequences of the desperate scenes conveyed to us by the media in the past few years. Such scenes have come from the coast of Tenerife, from Malta, which has been overrun at times by people coming across by sea, and from the gulf of Aden, where people go to reach Yemen and go onwards to the west. Against that backdrop, it is hardly surprising that the trafficking of humans has become the fastest-growing international crime, as has been mentioned today.
	Human trafficking does not happen only within our own borders; it is a growing problem in developing countries. The International Development Committee, of which I am a member, visited Ethiopia last year. We visited a local organisation that carried out a good deal of work to protect young children from poor, rural areas who had been sent to towns and cities in the hope of a better life. However, those children had often ended up as mere chattels.
	Child labour and bonded labour are prevalent in many parts of Africa and Asia. It is estimated that 20 million people are trapped in bonded labour, domestic slavery and trafficking, the vast majority of whom are women or children. We must address the rights of children and women in particular if we are to change the culture that offers tacit support for such forms of bonded labour and trafficking. It is interesting to note that last year there was a TV programme in China that highlighted people being snatched from their rural communities to be used as slave labour in neighbouring areas. That prompted a massive response in China, as it was the first time that there had been a public acknowledgement of the problem and its scale, and it resulted in thousands of people coming forward to state the extent of the abuse in their own communities.
	For the world's youth, we need to provide the opportunity to obtain decent work, either at home or through properly organised and legitimate migration. That will require increased co-operation and harmonisation of policies and programmes if we are to maximise its success. As has rightly been stated, we need co-operation right across Europe and outside Europe if we are to have a good alignment in our policies to curb trafficking here and in the developing world.
	The World Bank report recommends that a framework of policies is required to give young people expanding opportunities and the ability to improve their personal capabilities, and thus their income levels, but we also need to provide opportunities for them to have an effective voice in their communities and in public life. The ILO has called for global action to tackle the decent work deficit. Decent work is productive and delivers a fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for families, as well as allowing people to express their concerns and to organise. If we had that throughout the world, we would not have the problem of human trafficking that we see on our streets today.
	As levels of wealth in the world have increased enormously over the past 30 years, the share of that wealth that is represented as income has decreased consistently. We cannot shy away from the conclusion that the tragedy of human trafficking is at least in part a consequence of insufficient attention to creating more work through greater investment in job-intensive industries. While the service sector has produced many new jobs in recent years, the agricultural sector has been largely static. Yet the demand for food globally is increasing at a significant rate, and over the past five years demand has been higher than supply. Not only in our development assistance programmes but in global macro-economic policy, we need to do much more to foster greater investment in creating jobs. I hope that the UN summit in Vienna in the next few weeks will try to deal with some of those issues and give them greater priority.
	The Minister referred to the TARA—trafficking awareness-raising alliance— project, which runs in Scotland and is based in Glasgow. I commend the successful collaboration that has been taking place, particularly through the good offices of Glasgow city council and Home Office departments based in Glasgow and working with the Scottish Executive. The police have pointed to the continued problem of getting women to speak to the authorities. It is not surprising that they feel damaged and mistrustful of authority, so an extension of the reflection period should be seriously considered.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) and the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb), my colleagues on the International Development Committee, rightly stated the need to address the domestic sex industry, which is fuelling demand in sex trafficking. The Minister may be aware that new laws recently came into force in Scotland under the Prostitution (Public Places) (Scotland) Act 2007, which specifically criminalises kerb crawling. To date, 40 men have been charged with that offence. I welcome the public campaign that was launched this week in Scotland, but more needs to be done. I hope that today's debate will lead to a further debate on prostitution-related issues throughout the United Kingdom.

Peter Bone: It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin), who made a powerful speech, particularly her point about the roots of human trafficking and the fact that the victims come from countries where there is grinding poverty. She also made a point about the need to increase the period of reflection for victims of human trafficking.
	I congratulate the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) on securing an Opposition day debate that has been so well attended and thoughtful, and in which there has been so much cross-party agreement. The great advantage of such a debate is that it highlights the problem of human trafficking. It is also very helpful to have the Minister here; he has fought very hard within the Government to deal with that problem. It is also good to see the Solicitor-General on the Front Bench; she has shown a great deal of interest in this subject. I would like to congratulate the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), who is the chair of the all-party group on trafficking of women and children. As the treasurer of that group, I know how he has used his energy and expertise to publicise this matter. If it had not been for his efforts, we may not have had this debate, and the resulting media coverage.
	The greatest problem that I had with this issue was believing that it was actually happening. I first got involved when an anonymous letter from a constituent was dropped through my letterbox. I shall quote a part of it:
	"I am a self-employed therapist and yet there are women who are on benefits and paying no taxes—i.e. in Northampton an Albanian massage parlour are allowed to advertise and I have been told the men do people trafficking and drugs and the girls pay no tax...I am a professional lady and I get fed up with them asking for sex without a condom (I only do massage) and they are causing AIDS to spread. Please talk to the tax office and the police as somebody told me the Romanians in Northampton allow prostitution to flourish on the red light district"—
	and she then gave a mobile telephone number.

Patrick Hall: The hon. Gentleman has made the point extremely well about the surprise many of us have felt when first finding out about this issue. I would like to remind him about the well-attended meeting of the all-party group on 4 December, where the important message was struck home that human trafficking for the sex trade is not only a big city crime, but manifest in towns and villages throughout the land. There is still a great deal of ignorance about that, which the debate and the all-party group can help to address.

Peter Bone: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I know of the interest that he has shown in this matter.
	I also must acknowledge the effort that ECPAT has made in raising awareness and dealing with the problem, and I know how closely it has followed the debate today.

Bob Spink: Does my hon. Friend accept that the vast majority of women involved in the sex trade, particularly the young ones, are victims of the trade?

Peter Bone: Indeed, they are victims.
	When I first got to know about this issue, I talked to Northamptonshire police, which confirmed that it was a real problem in our area, just as it is throughout the country. The Northamptonshire police quite often found that when it raided a brothel, the victims it discovered there would not co-operate. The force was pretty smart about that; it got the gangs who run the brothels on immigration laws, and got them expelled from the country, but that is not really a satisfactory way of dealing with the issue.
	I decided to try to get to grips with the subject by producing a pamphlet called "Slavery in the 21st century—the trade of human beings for sexual exploitation". The problem is that I have never been able to finish it. Every time I think I have finished it, I find out that the problem is greater and that there is more depth to it. I am grateful to Richard Britton and Miss Leigh Hooker for the research they have done on it. I had thought that the problem was simply one of bringing in people from abroad and putting them into prostitution. However, now we learn that people are trafficked within the United Kingdom, perhaps from Manchester to Cornwall. I hope that I will finish the pamphlet one day.
	I want to give a couple of examples of the way in which people are trafficked into this country. The all-party group met some child victims, who had been brought into the country and forced into prostitution. One young lady was very black and had been brought here when she was 14 by a middle-aged white man on a passport that did not include her name or picture. She was taken to Liverpool and forced into prostitution. She escaped, made her way back to London, found somebody who spoke her language and who took her to the authorities. Thankfully, the NSPCC intervened to look after her. I asked her whether she was shocked at being forced into the evil trade and repeatedly raped. She said, straight faced, "Well, of course, I was being forced to do it in Kenya before I came to this country." The hon. Member for Glasgow, North alluded to such matters earlier. The grinding poverty and the sort of activities that happen in the countries from where the victims come are also great problems.
	We are considering modern-day slavery. The victims have no rights and they are often locked up, but they are sometimes taken to what one might call public brothels. One might ask why they do not run away. The answer is that they are worried that their families might be intimidated. They are terrified of the traffickers and frightened that the most appalling things will happen to them. One might ask why they do not go to the police. The simple answer is that, in their country, the police are as corrupt as the traffickers. One does not have to go far to find an example. A reliable source attested that, at St. Thomas's hospital, a young lady ran out of the sexual diseases clinic along the corridor as fast as she could. She was pursued by an Albanian, who claimed that she was his property. That happened across the road from Parliament.
	I want to deal briefly with prostitution. I understand where many hon. Members come from on the subject, and I am interested in the outcome of the debate. There appears to be no difference in the number of trafficked victims into the Netherlands, Sweden and this country, yet we all have different rules on prostitution.

Denis MacShane: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Peter Bone: I would love to give way but I am conscious that other hon. Members want to speak.
	I agree with my hon. Friends on the Front Bench, which is not always the case, that we must have stronger border controls. I do not want to get into a debate about border police and so on. However, when I ran a travel company, I took young female workers to Florida to visit our associated company and understand the way in which the travel trade worked. Every time we went to America, I was let through, and went to get the baggage, but the three young females were taken off and interviewed for up to an hour, even though they had letters from their parents stating that they could come on the trip. We do not do that. If we did that sort of thing, we would reduce the number of victims that come into the country.
	We could do a host of things to help people once they are here, but if we could stop them at source, it would be useful. That is an example of a practical measure that could be introduced quickly.

Fiona Mactaggart: I thank hon. Members in all parts of the House who have supported my campaign to tackle the demand side in prostitution, because that demand is specifically directed at trafficking. I should also like to apologise to House if, because of the shortness of time when I moved new clause 2 to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, my remarks misled people about the numbers of women involved in trafficking. I direct hon. Members to the corrected  Hansard on the matter.
	We need to start by asking what constitutes trafficking. I want to deal with that question, to ask why the most significant issue for Britain is trafficking for sexual exploitation and to argue that the Government must now do two things to reduce the impact of such trafficking: first, reduce the demand for prostitution; and secondly, adopt a human rights approach to the victims of trafficking.
	What is trafficking? As the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) rightly pointed out, trafficking does not require the transport of people across borders. It does, however, require
	"the use of coercion, force or threats, including abduction...the use of deceit or fraud...the abuse of authority or influence or the exercise of pressure"
	and
	"the offer of payment."
	Those oppressive, abusive means, which are quoted in all the international protocols and framework decisions, result in consequences for the victim. However, her consent is not relevant, because of the abuse of power that is inherent in those means. It is important to understand that point. I argue that all women in prostitution are the victims of trafficking, whether they have come from another country or this one, because of the route that they have taken into prostitution, which almost always involves coercion, enforced addiction to drugs and violence from their pimps or traffickers. It is important for us to understand that the experience of the prostituted woman is one of being trafficked, whether she was born in Moldova or Manchester.
	If we start from that understanding, we see how critical it is that the Government deal with demand. Traditionally, the Home Office has seen the pull factor in trafficking as its immigration policy. In fact, the pull factor is the demand for prostituted women. I welcome the hon. Gentleman's recognition that trafficking does not require transport across borders. However, I query his claims about the statistics for the number of women trafficked into countries that have legalised prostitution, because there is no doubt—nobody would dispute this—that there are more prostituted women in those countries. I dispute his figures, although there is an argument to be had about how many of them were brought across borders to be prostituted in those countries. However, there is no doubt that there are more women who are prostituted in countries that claim to regulate prostitution.
	Let us think about the ways in which the power over those trafficked women is exercised. Sometimes we are talking about women who are chained to radiators; more often we are talking about control in more subtle ways. As I have mentioned, control is frequently exercised through drug addiction, unpredictable violence, observing people or using witchdoctor techniques. A whole range of techniques can be used to keep women in a profession that puts their lives at risk. In every study, women in prostitution have been found to be 40 times more likely to die than other women of their age. In one US study, 50 per cent. of the prostituted women studied who had died had been murdered.
	If we are to tackle this, we need to establish a mechanism to reduce the number of women being murdered and to save huge numbers of women from violent exploitation. The first step is to reduce demand. Men who buy prostitutes become part of the chain of trafficking. Unlike people who buy trainers that have been made by exploited labour, the men who buy prostitutes are directly part of the chain. We should therefore take action to prevent them from becoming part of it. According to the advice of the UN special rapporteur, that should involve taking legislative action against the demand for prostitution. In her excellent report, the special rapporteur argues:
	"Demand created by prostitute-users is not the only factor that drives the sex trafficking market. However, it is the factor which has received the least attention and creative thought in anti-trafficking initiatives. By and large, anti-trafficking policy has been directed towards detecting, preventing and punishing the conduct of traffickers, or towards stemming the supply".
	If we were to reduce the demand in Britain, we would reduce the number of trafficked women.
	In addition, we can reduce the supply of women by helping them to exit prostitution. That is part of the human rights approach. We should invest much more effectively in exit schemes for women in prostitution, whether they have been trafficked from another country or trapped into prostitution by pimps in this country. It is a hard business for a woman to leave her pimp. One of the reasons that women and children are likely not only to be trafficked but to be re-trafficked is that they are vulnerable in the first place. It is hard for them to resist being re-trafficked, but if we have effective exit campaigns and support mechanisms that can help those trafficked and prostituted women, we can save many of them from the fate that too many of them face.
	It is striking that this is not only a human rights issue but a women's rights issue. As the UN special rapporteur points out in her report, many of the countries that supply women into prostitution, and supply the demand, have attitudes towards women that belittle and degrade them. That makes it more possible to see women as objects to be traded. If we create a culture—as the advertisements in our local newspapers do—that sees women as objects to be traded, more women will be trafficked. We know how to stop this, and I urge the Government to take urgent action to protect women from that trade.

Brooks Newmark: I am delighted to wrap up the Back-Bench contributions to this debate. I have always believed that this country should be rightly proud of the abolition of the slave trade as an outstanding act of moral and political courage. We should indeed celebrate the vision and courage of many of our predecessors without embarrassment, caveat, deep sorrow or apology. More importantly, however, we must continue to demonstrate to the international community that Britain does not, and will not, rest on its 19th century laurels, and that it will lead the 21st century fight against contemporary forms of slavery.
	The Bishop of Sheffield said in a sermon to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain that
	"we do not celebrate the end of slavery. For slavery is more rife in the world today than it was 250 years ago."
	It is one thing to point to the existence of a law, and quite another to uphold it. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) said:
	"The legal argument has been won: laws against slavery exist in every country. The moral argument against such a thing is, of course, enduring".
	The focus for today's debate should be the enduring moral argument against slavery, not the achievements of the past or, indeed, the short-term initiatives of the present.
	The first thing that we must focus on is strengthening the perception that human trafficking is slavery. Since we are left today with a modern evolution of an age-old evil, we should preserve the word "slavery" to describe it. It is a shame that we have updated and, in some ways, sanitised modern-day slavery by calling it human trafficking. It has the same quality of moral ambiguity or neutrality as another famously cruel misnomer—the notion of "honour killing". I appreciate that the term is an international definition derived from the UN's Palermo protocol and the Council of Europe's convention, but "slavery" is a word that resonates with ordinary people, while "human trafficking" is more resonant with the mandarins than with the man on the street. I do not believe that that distinction is cosmetic.
	One of the challenges of combating human trafficking is raising awareness among those who create a demand for it—a point made by many hon. Members—and reducing demand is indeed a key factor in controlling the scale of the problem. Initiatives such as the Fairtrade label and Rugmark help prevent legitimate consumers from purchasing goods that have been produced using slave labour. Changing purchasing habits is clearly a step in the right direction. However, as operations such as Operation Pentameter and its successor demonstrate, the bigger challenge lies in raising awareness that human trafficking is very much akin to slavery so as to reduce the demand for its victims.
	Secondly, and more importantly, I am glad of the opportunity to focus on the Government's proposals for the future. Reading the Library briefs left me with the impression that the Government have been slightly drifting, if not actually stalling, on this issue in recent years. The Joint Committee on Human Rights referred in its 2006 report to some admirably alliterative goalposts for the Government's policy on trafficking: to prohibit and prevent trafficking, to prosecute and punish traffickers and to protect the victims of trafficking. One of the criticisms of the Government at that time was the failure to sign up to the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings.
	Along with every hon. Member, I welcome the recent moves by the Minister to speed up the ratification process, but it is a scandal that it took the UK so long even to sign the convention, let alone to proceed with the ratification process. The circumstances of the UK's very late signature of the convention were scarcely more edifying than those of the Prime Minister's signature to the Lisbon treaty. For the more cynically minded among us, it would be possible sometimes to see the Government's response in terms of gesture politics.  [Interruption.] The Leader of the House is saying "Oh, no", but the convention opened to signatories on 16 May 2005, while the Government did not get around to signing it until 23 March 2007, which—by coincidence, I am sure—was just two days before the bicentennial of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act 1807. I assume that the Minister would have signed on 25 March, had it not fallen on a Sunday in 2007. On 21 February last year, the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, gave the House a commitment to look into the issue of ratification of the convention and to report back. Yet it has taken nearly a year for a Minister to make a statement to this House; indeed, the Minister has come to the Dispatch Box only to respond to an Opposition motion. It is a great shame that the convention will enter into force next month without Britain at the fore.
	Thirdly, I want to conclude by challenging the Minister on some of the Government's specific objectives. Operation Pentameter was hailed as a great success and its successor is halfway through its six-month life. Can the Minister make any commitments about the Government's long-term strategy for the policing and prosecution of human trafficking, particularly in light of the decline in prosecutions under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 between 2006 and 2007?
	The UK's action plan for tackling human trafficking has been described as a living document that will continue to develop in order to accommodate evolving best practice, so what lessons have been learned from Operation Pentameter that will inform the Government's policy in future? Is the Home Office meeting with any success in its research into the nature and scale of the problem, which has historically been bedevilled by a lack of concrete statistical evidence? More specifically, how is the strategy continuing to evolve in the light of the continuing impact of EU enlargement?
	Finally, what steps are the Government taking to move away from ad hoc support for victims, paid for by periodic grants to the voluntary sector rather than by sustained funding? The POPPY project, for example, of which we have heard much this afternoon, was given a £2.4 million grant in April 2006, but the grant is to run over two years. I suspect that that decision will need to be revisited in the future. We need sustained funding, but we should also make full use of the capacity of safe accommodation—a point made earlier—by encouraging referrals and broadening referral criteria to include those under 18.
	I hope that the Government will act decisively to consolidate all the work that has already been done, and I hope that the United Kingdom will once again lead the world in the fight against slavery instead of allowing the pace of change to be set by others.

David Lidington: The debate has been characterised by a generally constructive attitude among members of all parties, and there has been a large measure of cross-party agreement. Where there has been disagreement, it has been expressed both across the Floor of the House and within political parties, but I think that all who have spoken have been united in a shared loathing of the evil practice of human trafficking, and a determination to do all that lies in our political power to bring that trade to an end.
	The debate was graced by no fewer than three chairmen: the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, and my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on trafficking of women and children.
	I think there was a consensus that the debate focused on three themes: the need to disrupt supply, the need to protect the victims, and the need to seek measures to reduce demand for trafficking. I want to say a little about each of them.
	It is clear to me that we need to do what we can to increase the risk to the traffickers that they will be caught and then convicted. Several Members made the point that, despite the hopeful trends announced by the Minister, the number of prosecutions and convictions, not only in the United Kingdom but in many other countries, looks incredibly low when set against the sheer scale of the problem. According to United Nations figures cited by the right hon. Member for Leicester, East, more than 1 million people are being trafficked each year, and the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Mr. Costa, said in his most recent report that he was disappointed by the low rates of convictions for perpetrators of human trafficking.
	To an extent, the answer clearly lies in our doing what we can to improve the criminal law and measures of enforcement. The Minister outlined some of the measures that the Government have undertaken and continue to undertake, and my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) and other Conservative Members have advocated further ideas. In particular, we have strongly urged the creation of an effective border police force for the United Kingdom. However, looking at the criminal law and policing will not be an answer in itself. As my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes pointed out, we must use diplomatic pressure as well, not least to persuade other members of the Council of Europe that they too should ratify the Council of Europe convention without further delay. We must put diplomatic pressure on countries, wherever they are in the world, that are simply failing to address the challenge posed by this evil trade with adequate energy or dedication.
	In its most recent report on trafficking, the US State Department lists a number of countries friendly towards the west that are among those that are failing even to enforce the duties imposed by international law and United Nations resolutions. I believe that, in the last resort, we should be prepared to follow the United States' example, which it has written into its law, and consider withholding non-humanitarian and non-trade assistance to countries that consistently fail to comply with their moral and legal obligations.
	In that context it is important that the Government reflect on the extent of their network of embassies and high commissions. A number of hon. Members have talked about how this trade is a particular curse for much of Africa. When I have met representatives from the embassies of north African countries, from Egypt to Morocco, they have told me how societies are being disrupted by large-scale criminal trafficking of miserable human beings brought from western and central Africa through their territories, with the traffickers wanting to move them on to Europe.
	There is now no British post in more than 20 African nations. I think that it is true that if we were to land in Mauritania and walk east, the first UK embassy or consulate that we would encounter would be in Khartoum. I ask the Government to reflect on whether that gap in our diplomatic coverage reflects the seriousness with which we should approach this problem today.
	We also need to do more to integrate the aim of reducing trafficking into our development policies. The hon. Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) said that the victims of trafficking often succumb to the temptation of traffickers out of desperation and dire poverty. My hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) said that this is a problem that has victims worldwide, not just in the UK, so I would like our objective of disrupting trafficking to be built into our bilateral development and assistance programmes. In addition, I would like Britain to do whatever it can to ensure that the objectives of multilateral development programmes such as the International Monetary Fund's poverty reduction programmes take account of the need to reduce human trafficking.
	A particular challenge is facing the UK. The right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) talked about how Germany saw an upsurge in trafficking in connection with the World cup in 2006. The German Government organised a comprehensive anti-trafficking initiative at that time. I hope that the British Government even now are planning what we need to do in respect of what I suspect may be similar pressures at the time of the Olympics in 2012. We would all support the Minister in planning early for that occasion.
	On protection for victims, I think that every Member who has spoken wants the Government to develop further the laudable initiatives that they have undertaken. One thing came through strongly from the comments by my hon. Friends the Members for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) and for East Devon (Mr. Swire) and the hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran)—the importance of taking seriously the plight of trafficked children.
	The right hon. Member for Rotherham and the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) argued passionately that one way to reduce demand would be to create new criminal offences to tackle the sex trade in particular. The Opposition Front-Bench team supports the review that the Minister has announced. We agree with the Home Secretary that we should look carefully at the evidence. There are questions that need to be tested in that examination, but we will approach that debate in a constructive spirit.
	I want to make a further point about reducing demand. I do not think that this is something to which politicians alone have the answer. When William Wilberforce was rallying British opinion against the slave trade he said that
	"the nature and all the circumstances of this trade are now laid open to us; we can no longer plead ignorance, we cannot evade it".
	It is true not only for Members of Parliament, but for every man and woman in this country who has eyes to see and ears to hear, that this accursed trade in men, women and children disfigures our world and that individual citizens—as consumers of products, sometimes made by people who are the victims of trafficking, and as people some of whose neighbours are customers of the sex trade—have the power to do something through their voices and their actions.
	Those Members who have spoken in terms of outrage and shame are not exaggerating. We are rightly accustomed in this House to sober, rational debate and to considering evidence, and we should certainly continue to look carefully at the evidence on what measures will work effectively. However, it seems to me that, in the end, we need to combine political commitment with that sense of moral outrage. I believe that political action inspired by that clear moral purpose will enable us to reduce, and I hope one day eliminate, this trade.

Vera Baird: I thank all Members who have participated in this excellent debate. It is obvious that there is total abhorrence of this evil crime across the House, and many voices have been raised. My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary has demonstrated not only by the sense of what he said, but by his obviously open, willing and committed attitude, how deeply the Government are committed to tackling this horrible crime. I will try to weave a response to Members' contributions into what I have to say, but I hope that they will forgive me if I do not name them all; as there have been 17 contributors so far, if I were to try to do so it would sound like "Baird's guide to parliamentary constituencies".
	The Government's approach to trafficking involves being as inclusive and as multi-agency across the board as it is possible to be. Not only do we have a joined-up approach at policy level—we are always open to constructive suggestions such as those put forward today—but, for instance, the inter-ministerial group has a stakeholder group from non-governmental organisations with which it frequently engages in very unvarnished ways. There is also a practical approach on the ground: we have collaborations such as POPPY project outreach workers working at the UK Human Trafficking Centre to give advice. We are as inclusive as possible, and after this debate I can only expect that that will get better.
	Having some responsibility for the Crown Prosecution Service, I am pleased that there have now been 70 successful convictions since the Sexual Offences Act 2003 brought specific legislation on trafficking into UK law. However, let me assure those voices of concern that have been raised that this does not reflect the full extent of prosecution against traffickers. On many occasions and for many reasons, traffickers are prosecuted for rape, kidnapping, sexual assaults and physical assaults, and I assure the hon. Members for Totnes (Mr. Steen) and for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) that large numbers of them are convicted. It is important to remember that those convictions do not show in the simple statistics on trafficking convictions, but they are a significant part of the weaponry we use.
	Sentences have been long; the courts also understand the serious nature of these offences and send out strong messages. Despite that, however, we need to go further. The CPS is in the forefront of Operation Pentameter. It now has specialists on trafficking in all its areas, and it has lawyers seconded to the trafficking centre. There is also national guidance. The hon. Member for Totnes made the point the most powerfully, although several other hon. Members mentioned it, that to prosecute successfully one needs evidence.
	In Pentameter 2, a specific piece of work is being done on victim attrition, but it is not simply offering support—we are obviously trying to do that. The reality of trafficking is that the levels of intimidation are sky high and the trauma is intense. It is a hugely difficult matter. Many people are simply unable to help, so we must additionally look to other ways of preventing this trade from flourishing.
	One of the Serious Organised Crime Agency's top four aims is tackling trafficking through prevention, disruption, asset recovery and prosecution. In addition, the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 has been introduced. The Gangmasters Licensing Authority has revoked 42 licences, and 36 applications have been refused. Those cases do not show up as prosecutions, but bad gangmasters have been put out of business. Concerns were raised by the hon. Member for Eastleigh and my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) about work restrictions and the perhaps unforeseen consequences that they can have. We are committed to working on that.
	As the Home Secretary said on Monday, we will ratify the Council of Europe's convention by the end of the year. Let me be clear that we are compliant with much of it now, but we need to make some changes to domestic legislation. This is not any kind of delay by, or deficit of, the UK, and to call it a shame or anything of the kind is bonkers. The hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) did so briefly, but then he rightly became more urging of consensus. It is only a pity that his urging of consensus did not reach the hon. Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark).
	Some signatories have legal systems that mean that they allow ratification even before implementation—indeed, some systems demand ratification before implementation. Our system works the other way round. We cannot ratify a treaty until we have implemented it in our domestic law, so the process takes longer for us. May I reassure the hon. Member for Totnes, and my hon. Friends the Members for Erith and Thamesmead (John Austin) and for Hendon that the monitoring mechanism GRETA does not come into force until February 2009, and if we ratify this year, as we intend to do, we will not miss participation in that process? We will ratify as quickly as we can, but we will not stop there. Our existing action plan goes further than the convention requires us to go. Now that we have got this constant returning to the issue of ratification out of the way by giving that undertaking, I hope that we can all move on more consensually.
	On demand, let me reassure the hon. Member for Ashford, who led for the Opposition, that no one is muddling up prostitution and trafficking, but they are clearly integrally connected. I was glad to have the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) on board on that point. I hope that he will speak to the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) and put him right. I was glad of the support of my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane). We think the correct figure is that about 4,000 women are trafficked for sex at any one time, so we think that his numbers from the  Daily Mirror are off.
	There is work to be done on reducing demand. My hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) has led a campaign on that. She put forward some of the reality that requires us to look honestly at whether we should follow the Swedish model of legislation and criminalise the purchase of sexual services across the board. We shall also look at tackling the advertising of any sexual services in the mass media—the hon. Member for Hexham (Mr. Atkinson) endorsed that—through stricter guidance at the very least, but if prosecution appears to be necessary, it will doubtless follow. We will also consider call-barring on phones that are obviously being used for brothels.
	There is a good deal that I cannot directly answer because of the time available. Essentially, we are modelling a proper system of victim referral and identification, as we must to implement the convention. The difficulty of identification is at its height in respect of children. Let me reassure everyone that we are working as hard and as well as we can on that.
	I reiterate the Government's commitment to bring to justice as many perpetrators of this heinous crime as possible, while at the same time ensuring that victims get protection and safety. So much more remains to be done, but—

Andrew Robathan: rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.
	 Question, That the Question be now put,  put and agreed to
	 Question put accordingly, That the original words stand part of the Question:—
	 The House proceeded to a Division.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I instruct the Serjeant at Arms to investigate the delay in the Aye Lobby.

The House having divided: Ayes 241, Noes 317.

Question accordingly negatived.
	 Question, That the proposed words be there added,  put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments), and agreed to.
	Mr Deputy Speaker  forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House condemns the trafficking of human beings as one of the most vile crimes to threaten our society; welcomes the Government's commitment to make the necessary legislative and procedural changes required to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings before the end of 2008; believes that ratification is an important milestone in the Government's concerted strategy to protect the victims of trafficking and bring to justice those who exploit them; notes that the UK Action Plan on Trafficking, published in March 2007 on the same day as the UK signed the Convention, comprehensively pulls together the work already under way across Government to tackle trafficking and creates a platform for future work; praises the work of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, established in March 2006 as the central point of expertise and operational co-ordination in tackling human trafficking; supports the valuable work done as part of nationwide police-led anti-trafficking operations, including Pentameter 1 and 2; and notes the £4.5 million of government funding provided over the last five years for victim protection under the POPPY scheme, which supports adult women trafficked into the UK for sexual exploitation.

PETITION

Post Office Closures (Hampshire)

Peter Viggers: I beg to introduce a petition relating to the proposed closure of Bury Cross post office in my constituency, signed by Mr. Christopher Donnithorne and a considerable number of other constituents.  [Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I ask hon. Members who are leaving to leave quickly and quietly, so that I can hear the hon. Gentleman.

Peter Viggers: One always tries to avoid that particular blot on one's escutcheon, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
	The petition parallels one that was signed by 2,000 of my constituents. The main reason given by the Post Office for the proposed closure was that the Bury Cross post office lacked public transport facilities. I pointed out immediately to the Post Office that Bury Cross is the post office in my constituency best served by public transport facilities. Indeed, there is a bus stop outside it. That appears to have been ignored by the Post Office, which still intends to close it. To that I say that politics has taught me that the important thing is to win the war, not the battle. We will continue to hope that the post office will remain open. The petition reads:
	To the Honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled,
	The Humble Petition of Mr Christopher Donnithorne retired and others,
	Sheweth
	That the Post Office is proposing to close Bury Cross Post Office at Gosport regardless of National Health Service plans to extend the Gosport War Memorial Hospital (immediately opposite said Bury Cross Post Office) to handle a minimum of 50,000 patients a year. That the potential customer base, for shops and services within 150 yards of this Post Office, will rapidly exceed the total population of the Gosport peninsula. That the Post Office closure proposal is based on inaccurate information, there being for example, no direct public transport links to either of the identified alternative venues. With the significant growth potential, good public transport link, and modern disabled facilities, closure of this busy Post Office at a bustling main road junction does not make sense, either in business or public service terms.
	Wherefore your Petitioners pray that your Honourable House shall urge Post Office Ltd to reconsider this particular closure proposal.
	And your Petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray, &c.
	[P000089]

POST OFFICE CLOSURES (HASTINGS AND RYE)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn. —[Ms Diana R. Johnson.]

Michael Jabez Foster: Nearly 60 per cent. of older people say that the local post office is essential to their lives, according to a recent Help the Aged survey. We have just heard a petition against the closure of the post office in another constituency. The post office is a much loved institution, and I want to tell my hon. Friend the Minister for Employment Relations and Postal Affairs that I am proud of the Labour Government for rejecting Opposition calls to privatise this essential service. I am proud that, unlike their Conservative predecessor, this Government have recognised the value of our communities by preserving a comprehensive network of local offices and have agreed £150 million a year as an ongoing social subsidy.
	We know that if the post offices were privatised, there would be just 4,500 profitable offices, and I suspect that they would be less profitable than they are now as a result of the run-down of the comprehensive service that is currently provided. I can therefore assure my hon. Friend the Minister that in asking him to reconsider some of the recent proposals, I am in no way relying on the petition-carrying Conservatives and Lib Dems, whose privatisation plans would destroy the service as we know it.

David Lepper: On petitions, does my hon. Friend share my concern, which I hope the Minister also shares, about the impression given at a public meeting in my constituency by Gary Herbert of the national consultation team of Post Office Ltd that however many signatures it bears, a petition against the closure of a post office might count as only one objection? I find that an insult to the people who have been campaigning to save post offices. Does my hon. Friend agree?

Michael Jabez Foster: If that is the case, I certainly would agree. In my constituency there are thousands who have not just taken to the streets outside the post offices, but signed a petition against the closures, which they consider so important. I hope that such petitions will be given greater weight than my hon. Friend suggests.
	It is the foresight of this Government that makes this debate possible. The Labour Government have recognised the need for a social subsidy to maintain the network, which it is not possible to operate wholly on a market basis. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister has inherited the current situation, but whoever made the decision to allow the Post Office to envisage 2,500 closures was mistaken, especially if they believed that that could be done without major social distress.
	For reasons that I will come to in a moment, that was a wholly unnecessary proposition. The Government have given quite sufficient by way of subsidy to support the existing network. However, the real problem has been that getting figures from the Post Office about the projected losses is like pulling teeth. Only yesterday was I able to obtain the figures in respect of the four offices that are threatened with closure in Hastings and Rye. Having seen those figures, I encourage the Minister to stop the closures and challenge the Post Office to explain why it has come up with these foolhardy proposals.
	I shall return to the financial situation, but first I shall say a little about why the four offices in Hastings must not be sacrificed. The proposals announced on 13 November by Post Office Ltd were for the closure of four of our local sub-post offices—the Tilling Green post office in Rye, the Hastings Old Town post office, the White Rock post office and the St. Leonard's Green post office. Hastings is the 29th poorest town in the UK. We have an elderly population who both love and rely on their post office. There are people there whose quality of life depends significantly on access to their post offices. Mr. Alan Maxwell, sub-postmaster of White Rock post office, has been in the business for more than 20 years. The post office has been going for much longer than that, but now faces closure.
	Mr. Morley, a wheelchair-using patron of Tilling Green post office, cannot get to the main town post office that is seen as an alternative; it is simply not accessible. Mrs. Eileen Clarke currently uses the Hastings Old Town post office. She is diabetic; if she walked long distances, she would risk a fall or worse. The Reverend Humphrey Newman, a disabled gentleman, tells me that he can walk only short distances and that he finds the St. Leonard's Green post office a lifeline. Kyriacos Korniotis, the St. Leonard's Green sub-postmaster, tells me that many of his patrons come from numerous local care homes. He is now serving second and third-generation customers who would have enormous difficulties if the post office closed.
	As we have heard, thousands more have signed petitions to express their opposition to the proposed closures. No one supports the post office closures except the Post Office itself. It is no good telling people that they are 0.8 miles over hilly terrain from their nearest post office; they may as well be told that there is a particularly welcoming branch in Timbuktu.
	I am not a luddite who believes that services should always be maintained, regardless of cost; I accept that if a service is unsustainable, there comes a point when it cannot continue. However, the fact is that many post offices are not unprofitable in the conventional sense. Why are we punishing with no good cause the poor, disabled and local folk who often use the post office for social interaction? Just two years ago, the Post Office decided on a range of closures; it was then losing £2 million a week. It closed branches, apparently to become commercially viable. Now it loses £4 million a week. What has gone wrong? We need a new ambition from both the Government and Post Office management. Short-termist closure programmes do not offer the solution.
	I acknowledge that lifestyle changes mean that some of the services that were previously demanded are no longer required. However, that is not the whole story. The Horizon system, in which the Government invested just a few years ago, was to make the Post Office the public's very interface with the Government.
	I have to criticise Ministers lightly for how they have allowed public services, such as the BBC licence and the like, to be lost to our "in-house service". That must not happen again. A degree of public nepotism is needed if we are to ensure that our post offices are used in the way intended. It is, of course, absolutely essential that post offices be used as our local banks, and the sooner the Government give assurances about the security of the Post Office card account, the better.
	However, for all that, we are looking at the here and now. We are looking at a generous settlement from the Government, offering—as I said—£150 million a year of social subsidy. According to the Post Office, that is £18,000 a year for each office. Why, then, are we closing much-loved offices such as Tilling Green, the Hastings Old Town post office and others?
	Fortunately, as a result of the recent disclosures, I am able for the first time to offer my hon. Friend the Minister some advice on why I think the Post Office is looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I have now received statistics in respect of the four local post offices that are candidates for closure. I do not have time to refer to them all, but I would like to take as an example the Tilling Green post office in Rye, run by sub-postmaster Roger Pankhurst. It shows why I believe that the Post Office's case is so fundamentally flawed. The figures show that Tilling Green makes an operating profit of £3,500 a year. That is the difference between what the Post Office pay the sub-postmaster for running the service and the income that he passes to the Post Office. Mr. Pankhurst has agreed that I should tell the House what he receives—£18,400 to run the service within the branch. He pays back the excess £3,500 to the Post Office. What is incredible is that the Post Office says that he makes a loss.
	Why is that? The Post Office adds infrastructure costs of more than £24,000. The post office at the local level costs £18,400, but the Post Office adds on-costs of £24,000. That is madness. Once those are set against the total cost, Mr. Pankhurst makes not a £3,500 profit but a loss of £10,000. These figures, which have not previously been published, at last show us where the real problem lies. How can the Post Office's central cost in supporting a local office significantly exceed the cost of running the office itself?
	Before decisions are made, it is necessary to look at the infrastructure costs. How are they made up? Where do they go? Where are the savings to be made? It appears that they are central transactional costs—that is, the costs of the business itself in relation to arranging bank accounts, paying out payments to claimants, and the like. I come to that view because of another figure that the Post Office has been able to give me. It has told me that if it closes Tilling Green, it will save £6,000 in infrastructure costs relating to that post office. It follows that the balance of £18,000 is the cost of the transactions.
	The problem is that if one takes those figures at face value and reduces the current infrastructure costs of £24,000 by £6,000, one is left with a figure of £18,000. The post office gets £10,000 towards that from other incomes at the centre. However, it effectively means that the migrating business will take with it a loss of nearly £8,000. That is nonsense. I can envisage local post offices saying, "Please, not here." That loss means in practice that an office that is profitable today will become unprofitable simply because of the migrating business. It is madness to close an office and then finish up by making another office even less profitable, and then no doubt include it in the next round of closures. Presumably, much of the loss attributed to the offices under threat may have come from the migration resulting from earlier decisions.
	It is manifestly the case that the problem is not the lack of profitability per se at Tilling Green or, for that matter, the Hastings Old Town post office—at least those two—but the vast infrastructure costs that are being incurred at the centre. If those central costs were trimmed by just a third, it would cost less—far less—than the average of £15,000 by which my hon. Friend the Minister has agreed to subsidise each of these post offices to keep them open. The Government have rightly recognised that social subsidy, which would rightly enable these offices to remain as they are, serving the public.
	As I said, we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The problem arises not at the local level but at the centre. We should have had the figures throughout—then the negotiation, consultation and petitions would have had a meaning—but at least we have them now. Such costs are not lost by the closure of local offices, or at least not the greater part of them. What is needed is not cosmetic surgery but a heart transplant right at the centre.
	If these decisions are not changed, what will I have to say to my 100-year-old constituent, Mrs. Roma Brierly, who has been using White Rock post office for many years and will now be cut off from what, for her, is an essential service? What am I to tell the small businesses of the old town in Hastings, which find it hard enough already in a deprived area but will now have to travel to town to do their banking? Incidentally, they have already told me that it will not be at the Post Office. The figures that I have given to the Minister suggest that that may be just as well, because it loses everything that it touches.
	What am I to tell the lady who uses Tilling Green post office because she can park her mobility carriage outside, which is impossible at the town centre office that is the alternative? I am certainly not going to tell her that it is the Government's policy, because I do not believe that it is their policy to close these post offices. My constituents will be mystified when I tell them that, with all this Government subsidy, the Post Office management have chosen to punish them.
	I thank the Post Office management for at last, albeit late in the day, giving me the figures proving the real reason why these closures are being proposed. I want to ask the Minister whether local authorities are prepared to make up the shortfall, although that should not be their task. Will he recommend that the Post Office consider such an offer? Post Office officials have told me that they would be happy to consider it, but they want not only to cover their losses but a contribution to their potential profits, or savings as they call them. Such profits or savings, however, are fanciful and unproven. The track record shows that the transfer of business will make them even greater losses. At the very least, they are speculative. Given the level of Government subsidy, I hope that the Minister will say that making up the loss is all that would be required, if it is possible to bring people on board.
	By my calculations, the proposals are no quick fix. Compensation alone would take two years, in the case of two of my branches faced with closure; in the case of the office in the old town, it would take 42 years to recover the compensation, based on the loss proposed by the Post Office. That is an amazingly stupid thing to do, but that is the figure and I challenge anyone to challenge it.
	I am sorry to give my hon. Friend the Minister such a hard time because I know that the current plan is not of his making. I appreciate that he will be noble enough vicariously to defend the Post Office and what it proposes, but may I counsel him against that approach? If he were my client, I would advise him that he should put his hands up for this one. He should offer mitigation, and offer it as soon as possible. That would start with a new direction for the Post Office. We should remember that we own it. It is our Post Office; thankfully, it has not been privatised by his Government. I want him to tell it to rethink its plans, open the books, halt the closures, stop what it is doing and work out how the Post Office can be the proud organisation that we, as a Labour Government, want it to be.

Patrick McFadden: I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Michael Jabez Foster) on securing this debate on post office closures in his constituency. As he implied at the end of his speech, he practised as a solicitor before he entered Parliament, and based on what we have just heard and his many other speeches in the House, I am sure that he was a very effective spokesman for his clients; he certainly has been one for his constituents tonight.
	My hon. Friend mentioned the branches in his constituency—Tilling Green, White Rock, Hastings Old Town and St. Leonard's Green—and I appreciate his concern for those local communities. As I have said during previous debates on this issue, I understand that a difficult decision has been taken, which causes concern among hon. Members of all parties, and in the local communities represented. The Prime Minister talked a week or two ago about having to take difficult decisions in Government and I am afraid that this has been one such decision. I am in no doubt about the concern my hon. Friend has raised tonight. He made a number of detailed points and asked some detailed questions, particularly on post office financing, which I will come to, but I hope that he does not mind if I set out briefly why the decision was made and announced last May.
	At heart, the decision was driven by declining numbers of customers and increasing financial losses for the Post Office network. As my hon. Friend said, the number of customers has declined by about 4 million per week and losses are running at about £3.5 million per week. A number of lifestyle changes are driving those factors, which I think he understands, given his speech. By that, I mean greater use of direct debit to pay bills, more payment of benefits and pensions into bank accounts, greater use of online services to carry out transactions such as buying car tax and so on. I appreciate that not everyone is part of those trends, particularly elderly people, but they are nevertheless real and inevitably have an impact on the use and the finances of the Post Office network.
	On top of that, the Post Office operates in an increasingly competitive environment with other providers bidding for, and sometimes winning, work that has traditionally been carried out by the Post Office, such as the BBC's decision on the TV licence contract. My hon. Friend is absolutely right when he says that the Government do not see the Post Office as a commercial network. We appreciate the social and community role played by post offices and the value of a widespread network that, even after this round of closures, will be far bigger than all the banks and supermarkets put together. That is why we have committed a subsidy of £150 million a year to support the network, a subsidy that did not exist under the previous Administration. However, despite the subsidy, the difficult decision was taken to reduce the size of the network, offset to some degree by the establishment of 500 new outreach services that may replace a post office with a part-time service or a service perhaps hosted by another partner in the community.
	I want to consider some of the specific points that my hon. Friend made. He raised several detailed issues about Post Office financing, especially the relationship between the central infrastructure costs and those of an individual branch. That is an important issue and I hope that I can clarify matters for him.
	My hon. Friend paid particular attention to the central infrastructure costs and asked how they could be higher in some instances than the payments to the agents who run the branches. If I explain what the costs entail, it may help. The payments to agents include two elements: a fixed fee and an additional, variable amount based on the business that the branch carries out. Post Office Ltd receives a mixture of fixed and variable income from its contracts with clients, for example, the Government, through the Post Office card account. However, increasingly, the trend in the competitive market, for example, in bill paying and so on, is for contracts to be based purely on transaction and service volumes, thus generating a variable income without being able to rely only on the fixed income. A declining number of contracts have a fixed income element geared towards covering network costs.
	In calculating the costs involved in a branch, Post Office Ltd allocates both income and infrastructure costs to an individual branch. My hon. Friend asked about the infrastructure costs. They reflect the large amount of support needed to sustain the largest retail network in the country and the franchise model operated by the Post Office. There is some difference between that franchise model and others.
	Unlike most franchise operations, in which franchisees source and pay for much of the supporting infrastructure themselves, Post Office Ltd covers virtually all the costs associated with providing its products. For example, two key elements are providing cash to the network and the IT system that supports it. The IT system links the whole network, facilitating and recording the wide range of services and financial transactions. Moving cash around the country and not charging branches for holding it are important parts of the central infrastructure support costs.
	Due to the nature of the business, especially paying out benefits, pensions and so on, there has to be a high specification of cash availability and robust contingency arrangements to ensure that post offices do not run out of money on payment days. That is an important and relatively costly element of the infrastructure costs. Other costs include maintenance of equipment, such as safes, alarm systems and other equipment in the post office, and the distribution of many leaflets and forms, often for accessing Government services. It is not unusual or surprising that those elements can form a sizeable part of the overall costs of a post office branch.
	The third element to be considered is the savings to Post Office Ltd, to which my hon. Friend alluded, from closing a branch. They include a proportion of, though not all, the infrastructure costs. That is because, although the cash may no longer have to be delivered to a specific office and the terminals for the IT may not be there, the Post Office still has central costs for maintaining such services nationwide. It therefore calculates that a proportion of, but not all, those costs will be saved when a branch closes.
	I appreciate that my hon. Friend is sceptical about that method of financing but it nevertheless exists and is an important part of the costs and calculations that are involved in supporting the network.

Michael Jabez Foster: I appreciate that my hon. Friend may not be able to answer my question today, but all the aspects that he has listed are specific to a branch. I have given him the figures. Out of £24,000, only £6,000 was attributed to that element. That means that £18,000—three quarters of the sum—is attributable to something else, to which he has not referred. I want to know about that.

Patrick McFadden: What I am saying is that the infrastructure costs attributed to the branch will not all be saved if that branch is closed, because there are certain support costs—in IT or cash distribution networks, for example—that still have to be maintained, even though there is one fewer branch in the network.
	My hon. Friend was also sceptical about Post Office Ltd's assumptions about migration and business. I want to make two points about that. First, those assumptions are not plucked out of the air; they are based on the experience of urban reinvention and what happened after that. Secondly, the assumptions take into account local circumstances. Post Office Ltd therefore does not take a blanket approach throughout the country when calculating the migration of business; rather, it also takes into account the proximity of other branches nearby, and so on.
	Those are the main elements in calculating the costs of an individual branch. I am not quite sure whether I followed my hon. Friend when he quoted some of the figures that he extrapolated for the branch. The best way to understand the position is that Post Office Ltd takes into account three things. The first is the payment to agents, the second is the central infrastructure costs in support of the branch and the third is the cost that Post Office Ltd calculates it can save if it no longer supports that branch. All three are taken into account in calculating the cost to Post Office Ltd of running that branch.
	Overall, the programme is to close around 2,500 post offices, with 500 new outreach services. I understand that that will be difficult. However, the £150 million network subsidy payment is designed to help the Post Office maintain a network of that size, after that closure programme has taken place.
	My hon. Friend raised one or two other issues, which I hope to touch on in the time available to me. He asked about third parties wishing to step in and pick up the costs of the branch. I have encouraged Post Office Ltd to engage seriously with local authorities or other third parties in that position. However, it is also reasonable for Post Office Ltd to say that all costs associated with the branch must be covered and to ask for a long-term commitment. It would not do my hon. Friend's or any other hon. Member's constituents any good if someone stepped in, but six months later the branch was going through the same closure process. Post Office Ltd will rightly ask for all the relevant costs to be taken into account and for a commitment of several years in support. I hope that that is of some help to my hon. Friend.
	Overall, the programme will lead to a smaller network than we have now. However, I believe that it can be a more stable network, provided that Post Office Ltd does one other thing—innovate to attract more customers.
	My hon. Friend asked me about the Post Office card account. There is a successor product to POCA, which we have been legally required to put out to tender. I am sure that the Post Office will make a strong bid, but the outcome will have to be decided in a proper way. It is not possible for the Government simply to grant the contract to the Post Office without its tendering for it. The decision on that will be announced later this year.
	Innovation is important, and there is cause for optimism. Post Office Ltd has been setting out new products and services. It is now the biggest provider of foreign exchange in the UK, and is doing more in car insurance, broadband and free cash machines, as well as setting up a new, safe Christmas savings club, to help protect against some of the problems that we saw with Farepak a year or two ago.
	Post Office Ltd is innovating. With a combination of cost control in the network, continued Government support, which my hon. Friend has acknowledged and which I have repeated tonight, and the innovation necessary to attract more customers, we can put the network on a more stable basis for the future.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Adjourned accordingly at eleven minutes to Eight o'clock.